Construction of buildings, which takes over a year to fructify due to delay in manual clearances, will now take about 60 days, as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has scrapped the process
Construction of buildings, which takes over a year to fructify due to delay in manual clearances, will now take about 60 days, as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has scrapped the process of physical permissions entirely, from May 18, and has gone digital.
In May last year, the BMC introduced the online Auto-DCR Single Window Clearance System. It has accepted 80 per cent applications online throughout the past year, for dishing out NOCs for constructions in the city. Between May 2015 and May 2016, the BMC received over 1,163 online applications for building clearances, approximately the same as those received for manual clearances each year, of which 524 have been already cleared.
The new process has been re-engineered to make it simpler for citizens to access their applications online, without having to file an RTI application.
Citizens will be able to trace their application through 27 types of searches, including by the architect’s name, the name of the building, plot, street, and file number.
Instead of citizens taking the file from one department to another, 14 departments within the BMC have been roped in for single window clearances, including the fire brigade, the solid waste management department and the sewerage department. The BMC also plans to tie up with organisations such as the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, Slum
Rehabilitation Authority, Maharashtra Housing and Development Authority, Railways and Coastal Regulation Zone authority, by linking permissions received from them to the BMC’s server. The BMC has tied up with the Airport Authority and National Monument Authority for permissions. This system also ensures that applicants are able to monitor their application online as it passes through each clearance stage. The system will also notify applicants as to why the permission is being delayed at any particular stage.
Meanwhile, the BMC is in the process of uploading old applications online and has completed 1.7 lakh files so far. For the future, it plans to create a Google Maps-like system, to create a real-time map of existing and ongoing constructions all across Mumbai.
