Why permit large housing complexes?

Why should permission be granted to builders to come up with huge apartment clusters, when the city civic authorities are not able to provide the infrastructural support required for the residents?

BBMP has said that cluster housing societies (apartments or villas) have to manage their own garbage. These housing complexes do not even have the public water supply system. However, the residents of these clusters are not exempt from any tax or cess to be paid to the BBMP, including the so-called development expenses. How fair is this? Who has to supervise whether these clusters really segregate wet and dry waste and dispose them in the right manner?

With uncontrolled growth, city authorities are not able to provide the infrastructural support. Pic Sudha Narasimhachar

Wet waste management may be supervised by the residents’ welfare associations but only if such apartment complexes have garden space. Many of them hardly have a row of decorative plants in the front and most of them have concreted the entire common area. Now, what happens to the wet waste collected in such clusters? What is the guarantee that the dry waste is not stealthily dumped by these associations illegally on vacant sites nearby? Instead, would it not be right for the BBMP to take care of the garbage produced by these complexes too?

Despite many challenges of such huge housing clusters, apartments are cropping up across the city and property prices are skyrocketing. Why should permission be granted to builders to come up with such clusters, when the city civic authorities are not able to provide the infrastructural support required for the residents? The builders get their share of the booty, the government gets all its taxes, stamp duty and other charges and the various private service providers make merry, while the ultimate sufferer is the common man, who pays everybody through his nose and is then left to manage all the challenges on his own!

Thousands of apartments are lying unsold or unoccupied. Yet new complexes are being constructed all over the city. Thousands of acres of agricultural land, which contained thousands of fully grown trees is being converted into concrete jungles without any foresight or plan. Do the authorities even think of multitude of challenges that the residents may face when they occupy these apartments – traffic, garbage, water, power, etc.?

Comments:

  1. Sindhoor says:

    When I look at the apartments under construction and look at the approach road, it scares me. One can only imagine the nightmare it will be when the structure is fully occupied and the inroads just do not have the capacity. Consider the upcoming malls as well. There seems to be absolutely no thought as to where to approve these and assess the impact it will have on the infrastructure around. The upcoming mall in Jogupalya is one such mall. I dread the day it gets functional. The apartment behind Manipal hospital is another disaster waiting to happen. Do people even know that there is a tiny little road that runs up along that hospital. What is to become of the patients at the hospital with the constant traffic jam this complex is going to create on that so-called road?

  2. S Srinivasan says:

    The Govt. and the BBMP are such that nobody knows what is done and who is responsible. Even within one organisation it is the same. The group who approves and clears the files, eat the money given under the table. Do they bother about the roads, hospitals, sewerage, availability of Electric power etc ? Bangalore city and now the outskirts are dotted with multistorey apartment complexes without any infrastructure before sanction. Builders make money and leave the buyers in the dark about what is approved and what is not. Ultimately, the buyers are the sufferers as they do not know what they have signed for and what they have got.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Similar Story

Marooned and abandoned: Study reveals displaced families were put in the path of floods

Perumbakkam in Chennai has faced floods in 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023. Despite that, 12,045 families were resettled there since 2015.

When Cyclone Michaung-induced floods hit the resettlement colonies of Perumbakkam, the houses on the ground floor were quickly inundated. On a priority basis, persons with disabilities were allocated houses on the ground floor. However, with the floods, their vulnerability pushed them further to the fringes. They were forced to climb stairs seeking refuge in other people's homes that already had leaky roofs and damp walls. This was not the first time people in resettlement colonies in Perumbakkam or Semmencherry were facing floods. Almost every year, November and December are months of struggle for the families, who are evicted and resettled…

Similar Story

Matharpacady: Resisting hot real estate deals to conserve century-old heritage

Despite the challenges of maintaining heritage houses, the residents of Matharpacady want to save the precinct for culture and community.

Renie Baptista, lives in a 100-old-legacy house in Matharpacady. The house, inherited by her father-in-law from his mother, invokes a mixture of legacy, emotional attachment to the neighbourhood, where people share similar cultural and social ethos. She also enjoys a sense of space in her 2000 sq ft bungalow, which, even now, is a sturdy house.  Shifting into a flat that could come with water and other infrastructural issues bothers her along with the worry of losing her link with her community spaces forever. Many others in Matharpacady share her anxiety. The quaint old charming bungalows and bylanes of Mazgaon village…