Bengaluru municipal body asks engineers to track construction violations

Plagued by the violations, residents in Whitefield have initiated a campaign to crowdsource reports from the public via a ‘Spot Violations’ campaign.

Bengaluru’s municipal corporation has ordered its ward engineers to monitor all building work in their wards and report violations to senior officials in a bid to streamline the process of curbing illegal construction.

“The approved building plans have been made available to assistant engineers, executive engineers and ward engineers to inspect the under-construction sites from time to time," Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) said in an order dated July 27, 2023, reviewed by Moneycontrol.
"The violations have become so widespread that it is necessary to prevent them effectively.”

BBMP has provided Rs 50 lakh as a fund to be utilised for complying with the instructions.

The corporation said in the order that the plinth line marking of a building, as per the plan, must be approved before construction starts. The plinth area is the built-up area covered and measured at the floor level.

According to the order, BBMP has set up a task force of the commissioner, joint commissioners, zonal chief engineers and officials from the urban planning department that will meet monthly and investigate complaints about construction violations.

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The task force will identify unauthorised constructions within stipulated timelines and assign BBMP contractors to clear them. Ward engineers, according to the order, have been mandated to ensure that construction starts only after the order is issued by the town planning department.

"To date, we have been tracking violation cases only after a complaint was received. However, after trying out several models over the past years, we have come up with a streamlined process to tackle the situation. We have assigned the responsibility of tracking and identification of violations to individual ward engineers and executive engineers," BBMP officials told Moneycontrol.

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Violations continue

According to a BBMP survey last year, about 200,000 buildings in the tech capital have deviated from sanctioned plans. In 2021, a survey revealed that more than 85 percent of the buildings constructed in 2020 and 2021 had violated building bylaws.

Illegal constructions and violation of building bylaws are said to have resulted in waterlogging in various parts of the city when rainfall is heavy. In September 2022, incessant rainfall several left parts of Whitefield, including the area’s main road, waterlogged for days.

Only a month earlier, BBMP had identified encroachments on stormwater drains from prominent developments including Bagmane Tech Park, Purva Paradise, Wipro, and Ecospace. In April this year, heavy rainfall in Bengaluru inundated the same areas, including the new Whitefield Metro Station.

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Plagued by the violations, residents in Whitefield have initiated a campaign to crowdsource reports from the public via a ‘Spot Violations’ campaign.

"We will upload the same on an interactive online map with GPS locations so that violations are exposed and everyone can see them. This campaign will be popularised by all the RWA groups and citizen federations in the area such as Namma Whitefield and Whitefield Rising," said Sandeep Anirudhan, an environmentalist.

However, a major challenge is the lack of transparency in the exchange of information between government bodies and residents. Anil Kalgi, an activist who filed a request under the Right to Information Act for details about a high-rise property in Bengaluru, said his application was rejected.

"It is still in appeal and accessing information like occupancy certificate status and building plan approval for projects I don't have ownership in is still a challenge," he said.