AHMEDABAD: The Gujarat high court on Friday frowned upon the authorities after the state government and Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) expressed reluctance to act quickly to implement the Building Use permission norms and insisted to let them first focus on implementation of the fire safety certification.
The bench of Justice Bela Trivedi and Justice Bhargav Karia said that the authorities will have to deal with both the issues – BU permission and fire NOC – simultaneously and granted them four weeks “to place on record the Action Taken Report with regard to the issue of fire NOC in the buildings where valid BU permission is available and to work out a policy and plan of action with time schedule to address the issue of BU permission in the state of Gujarat”.
Further hearing is posted on July 9.
The HC was hearing a PIL filed by petitioner-advocate Amit Panchal who sought implementation of fire safety norms after a fire incident killed eight Covid-19 patients in Shrey Hospital last year.
He has been complaining about authorities’ negligence towards building bylaws and court directions issued in the past.
The judges questioned the inaction by the authorities that allowed cropping up of illegal construction and insisted that the authorities will have to take “drastic steps” to permanently resolve the problem and stop ad-hocism.
To this, advocate general Kamal Trivedi said that this would cause a large-scale sealing drive and demolition of illegal structure and this would cause “commotion” among people and the city of Ahmedabad could be the first place to face the problem.
The AG submitted that the authorities be allowed to first address the issue of fire NOC and it would not be possible for the state authorities to resolve the issues of fire NOC and BU permission simultaneously.
He said that the BU permission is a major issue and it would require more time to address it.
The court questioned the government about its helplessness, about its inaction against the officials with whose “connivance and blessings” the illegal structures have cropped up.
After the state government, the municipal corporations and municipalities too requested the court to grant them more time to deal with the BU issue and not to insist on dealing with both of them simultaneously.
There may be lakhs of buildings without BU permission and taking action would take months.
The judges got annoyed and said that under the garb of fire safety, the authorities would issue fire NOC to all buildings, which lack BU permission and the problem would never be resolved.
They also said that such an approach would take another 20 years to implement the laws, as the authorities have already taken two decades but have not resolved the problem.
The judges said that the government cannot keep its eyes shut to the problems and it will have to act to enforce law and make people feel that the law would not allow them to put up construction as per their wish.
Looking at the problem, the judges also commented that the government may come up once again with an Impact Fee law to regularize unauthorised constructions.
The government has twice in the past brought such a law.