Bhubaneswar, March 3: The enforcement wing of the Bhubaneswar Development Authority is examining all legal and technical aspects involved in demolishing illegal structures across the city.

The development body, however, has hit upon a simpler procedure for the building approval plan for individual plot owners.

The Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) enforcement wing has identified 530 cases of illegal structures with violations of building plan approvals and 139 structures obstructing the flow of water along various natural drainage channels causing man-made floods and water-logging.

BDA vice-chairman Vishal Kumar Dev told The Telegraph: “We are taking violators to task on a war footing as illegal structures will no longer be permitted. We are also consulting with other states and development authorities about the modalities and plan of action to carry out demolition.”

Last week, BDA officials received communication from the Jaipur Development Authority and the Madhya Pradesh government regarding the formulae the latter had adopted to restrict illegal structures.

“We cannot issue individual tenders for each illegal structure, so we wanted to know how our counterparts had engaged experts and consultants to carry out demolition of bigger concrete structures,” Dev said.

The BDA, for the first time, notified a demolition drive on February 26.

The demolition will be carried out at five places in Kapilaprasad.

“There were actually six violators on the list, but later it came to our notice that one of them had regularised the illegal portion through an amnesty scheme. As the five others never took any initiative, we had to take this tough stand following the high court’s directive to publish their names in local dailies,” said BDA secretary Shreekanta Kabi.

Section 91 of the Odisha Development Authority (ODA) Act, 1982, says that once the notice is published in a newspaper, the authorities will wait for seven days and after that the demolition process will start. Within these seven days, if the landowners fail to demolish the unauthorised portions, the BDA will carry out the demolition drive, but will collect the charge from the landowners.

A houseowner from Pokhariput said, on the condition of anonymity: “More than 70 per cent of the structures in the city do not have building plan approvals. How will the BDA handle this?”

A senior BDA official hinted at a new amnesty scheme likely to be floated by the BDA shortly so that houses built with minimum deviations from the approved plan (less than 20 per cent), may be spared paying penalty.