Manoj Kumar at the RMC board meeting in Ranchi on Monday. (Prashant Mitra)

Good news for realty developers in Ranchi.

From this week, the capital’s civic guardian will resume approval of building plans, which was temporarily stalled since January.

The decision, announced at Ranchi Municipal Corporation’s (RMC) monthly board meeting on Monday, will offer hope for 92 plans in queue.

New chief executive officer Manoj Kumar, who had given stall orders last month, said he was unhappy with officials for failing to come up with exact figures of building plans approved by RMC in the past few years.

Hence, he had instructed them to come up with a monthly record of applications received before sanctioning any.

“I actually never got to see the statistics of any activity undertaken by RMC ever since I joined. Whenever I asked for a concrete figure, say for example, how many shops are there in the municipal area, the officials drew a blank,” Kumar said.

From now on, the RMC will maintain a monthly register of applications received and plans approved. The first such record showed that till Monday, 92 building plans were awaiting RMC nod.

Councillor of ward No. 28 Ashok Baraik rake up the plan issue at the board meeting by asking the CEO why revenue earned through approvals had gone down. It was then that Kumar revealed that he had enforced an “embargo”.

“The plan approval process will resume now that officials have started maintaining a monthly register of applications received. They will further record the ones approved and rejected, and also, reasons behind the latter,” the CEO said.

Councillors asked the CEO and deputy mayor Sanjeev Vijayvargiya to fix a time limit for plan sanction.

They told Kumar that decisions taken at board meetings were seldom implemented.

Om Prakash — councillor of ward No. 30 — pointed out that three months ago, it had been decided that ward-wise BPL lists would be prepared, but no step had been taken.

Kumar assured him that measures would be initiated within a week.

He also declared that on the 10th of every month, an RMC board meeting would take place to discuss and debate action taken reports.

In a related development, the CEO has ordered an immediate survey of licensed shops in municipal areas.