Hyderabad: Despite massive urbanisation, certain pockets in the city like Ameenpur, Manikonda, Nizampet and Pragatinagar continue to be village panchayats. There is a long pending demand for such ‘namesake villages’ to be brought under GHMC but local pressure has prevented it.
The peculiar case of such continuing ‘villa-ges’ result in a lot of deviations in basic rules of building permissions, ro-ad layouts and other technicalities in development works, as per experts in the field.
Under the situation co-mplete power rests with local authorities (village sarpanch), such areas grow without access to the required technical expertise unlike areas falling under the HMDA and GHMC limits. As a result, such areas have mushroomed right in the middle of urban areas, bristling with economic activity but in an unpla-nned manner.
“There are basically three kinds of land areas, one which is under GHMC limits but not Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority, others which are under HMDA and under Village Panchayat and others which are under Village Panchayat but not under the HMDA. While in the previous two, the building rules of the GHMC are applicable but in case of the third type, the building permission is given by Panchayat boards but the building rules are not followed,” explained a senior official of GHMC.
GHMC has been asking for such areas to merge with the corporation but most have resisted so far. Therefore whatever deve-lopment or building acti-vity takes places in these villages, permissions are given by the Panchayat boards.
“In case of the GHMC or HMDA rules being applicable there are specifications about the width of roads, open spaces between houses and roads, specification for where a big high rise building can come up keeping in mind the traffic density that the approach road can support etc. However, in case of village panchayats, there rules are not followed as there is no strict compliance. People use influence resulting in higher number of deviations and non-compliance,” said M.V. Rajeshwar Rao, CEO Confederation of Real Estate Developers of India, Hyderabad.
