New buildings coming up in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, July 1: The absence of a gazette notification or an executive order making no-objection certificate (NOC) from Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) mandatory for getting a plan approved by the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA), has made it difficult for the civic body to force builders to follow this rule.

The issue has been discussed time and again at BMC meetings. The corporation has been losing money because it would have charged two per cent of the project cost from the builder as periphery development charge before issuing an NOC. More than 600 cases have been detected so far in which builders have got their plans approved from the BDA without getting an NOC.

Admitting that the civic authorities were losing money, BMC commissioner Vishal Kumar Dev said: “In the past, the council had decided to request the Central Electricity Supply Utility (Cesu) to snap electricity connection to the multi-storeyed structures where NOC norms were violated, but since there is no government directive, strict enforcement is not possible.”

Sources in the BMC said the civic body had collected Rs 10 crore as NOC charges last year. With better enforcement, this amount could have doubled.

Councillor of ward No. 35 Sushmita Nanda raised the issue of NOC at the council meeting on Wednesday. She wanted to know how many apartments in her ward, whose builders had applied for the NOC, actually got them.

“I got the answer that whereas the number of applicants was 21, only two had got the NOC and four duplex did not need that. I am surprised to know why four did not need an NOC when all the apartment blocks are polluting the environment and releasing their sewerage water in the drains,” she said.

Kishore Mohanty, councillor of ward No. 48, said while a prominent real estate developer had paid only Rs 60 lakh for peripheral development instead of Rs 1.4 crore. After tabling the question at the council meeting, the authorities told him the builder had promised to develop the area on his own.

The application for NOC and getting the certification before the plan approval is mentioned in the guidelines stipulated in the Odisha Municipal Corporation Act, 2003. The NOC is required because the civic body has to approve the drainage, road connectivity and other safety aspects of the building construction.

“According to the 74th Amendment of the Indian Constitution, the plan approval power is with the urban local body, but since the BMC has no planning unit, it still functions with BDA. Once the unit comes to BMC, the execution of the NOC norms would be more binding,’’ said a senior BMC official.

Officials of the BDA planning unit said the development body had asked more than 100 builders to furnish the NOC first from BMC in order to get their plans approved.

On several occasions in the past, a number of councillors have raised the NOC issue at the council meeting. But since the mechanism lacks proper teeth, the civic body is yet to implement it firmly.