Relax high-rise guidelines: CM

Mumbai: Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan has told the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) to relax some provisions in the recently-framed guidelines on high-rises in the state. According to the new guidelines, the future of new high-rises will hinge on how wide the access road to the building is and how far the fire station is. 

    In late April, Chavan wrote to Jayanthi Natarajan, minister of state (independent charge) for environment and forests, saying that while he agreed that the provisions would be practical, it would be challenging to implement them in cities in Maharashtra. In the letter, of which TOI has a copy, Chavan said that the mandatory guidelines issued by the ministry would bring construction activity in Mumbai to a standstill. 

    "It is unfair that the location of a fire station will determine the development potential of a city. This will lead to an imbalance in development. The road width in most of our cities is well below the requisite standard and will not fulfill the criteria. In view of these hardships and practical difficulties, I request you to kindly keep this office memorandum in abeyance and give an opportunity to the government of Maharashtra to express our concerns," Chavan said. 

    He said in Mumbai, most construction projects involve redevelopment of old, cessed, dilapidated buildings, where in-situ development is carried out. Chavan explained that Mumbai has the slum rehabilitation scheme, wherein tenements for slum-dwellers and sale components for open markets are built in-situ. 

    "Both schemes are feasible only due to the floor space index (FSI) incentive, which in turn gets linked to the building height. Land is scarce in the city and all such schemes can be taken up only by going for taller structures. The utilization of transfer of development rights (TDR) on available plots also gets restricted due to limitations on high-rises," Chavan said. The CM requested the MoEF to relax these provisions for Mumbai, Pune, Nashik, Aurangabad and Nagpur.