Bengaluru: In the din of advertisements selling the dream of owning a home, people often forget the law which exists to ensure the safety of occupants in newly built houses or apartments.
While the Karnataka Municipal Act insists on a newly bought apartment or home having an Occupancy Certificate (OC) issued by a competent authority certifying it fit for occupation before people move in, over 90 per cent of apartments in the city don’t bother to get an OC, exposing the ugly nexus between builders and local engineers, say activists working for implementation of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 (RERA) recently passed by Parliament.
With the real estate sector still largely unorganised in the city, millions of home buyers are being conned, they claim.
“We recently carried out an awareness progamme about RERA and discovered in the process that over 90 per cent of apartment units are uncertified! This exposes the nexus between the builders and the BBMP and BDA officials,” said a RERA activist.
Under the KMC Act, a builder has to first obtain a plan sanction from the appropriate authority (the BBMP in the city), and then a commencement certificate before going ahead with the construction. Once the project is completed he must apply for an Occupation Certificate which is issued after inspection of the project by town planning department engineers, who are supposed to make sure it is in accordance with the sanctioned plan. But the law, it appears , is rarely followed.
“The BBMP hasn’t issued OCs to a majority of the city’s housing projects in the last 10 years. Big builders too are at fault as they obtain an OC for one project and use it for all the others. There is no mechanism to check this menace and crores of rupees change hands in these murky deals,’’ said a former bureaucrat, who initiated the process to cleanse the system, but was shunted out after differences came up with the then BJP government
With every sqft of property costing anywhere between Rs 3,000 to Rs 30,000, in the city, greedy builders often build extra floors in violation of the byelaws and sell them to ignorant buyers. They then grease the palms of BBMP and BDA officers to bypass the verification process and get the water and power connections from the BWSSB and Bescom respectively before handing over the property to the buyers, say industry insiders.
“The buyer moves in without fuss or insisting on an OC as he is already paying a hefty EMI on his housing loan and doesn’t want to pay rent too,” they added.
When contacted, BBMP commissioner, Manjunath Prasad put the onus on the BWSSB and Bescom.
“Both these agencies need to check for OC before giving water and power connections to a building. We have been asking them not to provide their services in the abence of an OC,” he said.
