The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) is mulling to restrict “regularisation” of illegally constructed portions of a building to 10 per cent of the sanctioned area of the structure or 5,000sq ft, whichever is lesser, officials said.

The current building rules do not have any capping on how much construction beyond the approved plan can be regularised.

“Regularisation” is a term used by KMC officials to refer to the process of declaring unauthorised structures legal after the payment of a fee by the builder or the owner of the structure.

Civic officials said the provision for regularisation is there to allow minor deviations from a building plan to remain if those do not impact the stability of a structure.

“At times people extend a structure beyond the approved plan, but it later emerges
that the additional construction has not violated any building rule,” said a KMC
official.

With time, the provision has been misused with developers erecting an entire building without a plan or adding illegally several floors to a building assuming that the KMC would finally regularise the illegal building or floors after accepting a fee.

“We have decided to fix a limit on the illegal structure that can be regularised.
The decision so far is to allow up to 10 per cent of the sanctioned area of a building or 5,000sq ft, whichever is lesser,” a senior KMC official said on Sunday.

“We will send the proposal to the state government. The final approval will have to come from them.”

The decision to regularise an illegal structure is taken by a special officer, a quasi-judicial authority, said officials.

Whether to pull down a structure or regularise it depends on the discretion of the special officer, who takes into consideration factors like structural stability.

The special officer, however, is guided by the provisions in the Building Rules 2009 and the KMC Act, 1980.

There is no mention of any limit on regularisation in the rules and the act.

KMC sources said if the limit is fixed, the special officer will not be able to regularise anything above it.

“Suppose, the sanctioned area of a house is 2,000sq ft. If the proposal the KMC is considering comes into effect, illegal portions measuring only up to 200sq ft will be regularised,” said a KMC official.

“Let’s consider a housing complex whose sanctioned strength is 2 lakh square feet. Ten per cent of the area is 20,000sq ft. But we will only allow 5,000sq ft of illegally built portions to be regularised. That is the reason the clause ‘whichever is lesser’ will be included in the proposal. We will not allow indiscriminate regularisation.”

The move to fix the limit comes in the wake of the collapse of an illegal under-construction building in Garden Reach that killed 13 people. The KMC has faced severe criticism for allowing illegal buildings to mushroom across the city.

In the last year, the KMC has demolished illegal portions of nearly 850 buildings. Many of the buildings that have been demolished were erected without any approved plan from the KMC.

The civic body has asked its sub-assistant engineers to inspect the wards every
day and identify illegal structures.