Time for Pune civic body to learn from Pune-Chinchwad's

At a time when the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) is ruthlessly hammering down hundreds of illegal constructions in its limits, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) is dragging its feet to take stern action against such buildings that have mushroomed across the city.

Moreover, the PMC is satisfied with just serving notices to owners of illegal structures and carrying out the demolition drive at leisure whenever the police force is available.

The million dollar question is what the building permission and the anti-encroachment departments of the PMC were doing when these illegal structures cropped up on hill slopes, hill tops and in the bio-diversity park (BDP) in old city limits and the 23 merged villages.

This could not happen without the evil nexus among the local corporators, politicians and the civic administration. This is what exactly happened in the case of an illegal building which collapsed in Taljai Pathar in Dhankavdi on Monday afternoon killing 10 people including children.

Owner of the ill-fated four-storeyed under-construction building, former corporator Sanjay Nande and Lahu Sawant, on whose land the structure was set up, were served demolition notices by the PMC building permission department on September 1, but the department did not take any cognizance while the construction of the building was going on for the past few months.

Even when the 23 villages were merged in the PMC limits in 1995, the civic body legalised the constructions in the merged villages through gunthewari, but it failed to plan and provide basic civic amenities to these villages.

The worst thing is that the development plan (DP) for the merged villages is still doing the rounds in Mantralaya corridors for being gazetted. So, in the absence of the DP, several hundreds of illegal buildings have come up in Dhankavdi, Vadgaon Budruk and other areas in the past 15 years. According to a rough estimate, there are around 80,000 illegal structures in the city and half of them are located in the 23 merged villages.

However, the building permission department of the civic body has identified around 2,500 illegal structures and demolished nearly 700 of them.

Founder of Pune Janhit Aghadi, Ujwal Keskar, said, “The nexus of local corporators, politicians and civic officials caused illegal constructions. It is mandatory on the part of the PMC to check the structural stability of a building.”

Additional city engineer Vivek Kharwadkar said, “We have to concentrate on the entire city to identify illegal structures to demolish them. As far as this particular building is concerned, some said that it was being constructed for the last 1.5 years, while some said 3 years, but when we identified this building we served it a notice for demolition.” “While considering the fact that illegal constructions pose a threat to society, we have to focus on the whole city, not a specific area and we have to carry out demolition drives to control illegal development,” he added.

He also said that the department conducted demolition drives in such a manner that those responsible for illegal constructions do not think that the PMC is lenient towards illegal construction.
So far, the PMC has cleared illegal constructions spread over 6.30 lakh sq ft across the city. When asked what is PMC’s next course of action to avoid such accidents, Kharwadkar said, “This is an eye-opener for all the stakeholders who are responsible for constructing illegal structures.