Chennai: Making it hard for landowners to get away with violating the Open Space Reserve (OSR) rule, the corporation on Tuesday said they would in future be issued a planning permit by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) only if they surrendered the OSR to it.
Passing the resolution, the corporation council noted that large stretches of Open Space Reserve land had not been handed over to it since 2002. Under the new policy, landowners will have to directly hand over the OSR land to the corporation and not the CMDA like they do at present. Only after the corporation council acknowledges receiving the land will the planning permit be issued by the CMDA.
Going by the law if the plot is 3,000 sq. meters in size or more, 10 per cent of it should be reserved for open space and if it is between 3,000 sq m and 10,000 sq m, developers/plot owners have the option of demarcating 10 per cent of the land for OSR.
The corporation council, which passed 67 resolutions in less than a minute without any discussion on them, also decided to set up helplines in all the 15 zones. The corporation’s helpline, 1913, functions from Ripon Buildings.
In other resolutions, the civic agency decided to recruit staff under the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana for new call centres and to procure diesel in bulk from the Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum.
