The decision has been welcomed by those in the real estate industry, who believe the benefits of the move would be transmitted to the consumers as it would aviod cost escalation owing to delay in projects.

The civic body also aims at keeping no proposal pending by mid-December. As per norms, the PMC is supposed to clear the proposals in two months from the date of application. “The civic body clears the proposals in the stipulated time but a few proposals remain pending, due to technical flaws or lack of certain documents. The civic chief has set a target for the department to achieve no pendency by December 15,” said Vivek Kharwadkar, additional city engineer.

He said the department is working on making the process speedier by setting up a schedule for the steps involved in clearing the proposals. “There should be either clearance or rejection of proposals within the stipulated time,” Kharwadkar added.

The ongoing move to accelerate the process of clearing building construction proposals, has yielded the PMC around Rs 100 crore in a month’s time, collected as development charges for approved proposals. A senior civic official said, “The administration would soon initiate the process of sitting across the table with architects to resolve the issues because of which several proposals are pending for long. A meeting with the Pune chapter of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association Of India ( CREDAI) was held to discuss the matter.” 

“The PMC recently held a discussion with us to bringing in reforms to speed up building permission process,” said Satish Magar, president of CREDAI, Pune. “The administration had been taking too much of time on proposals. This led to increase in the project cost and the heat was faced by the customers,” he said. he however praised the recent steps, taken by the PMC in one month has eased the situation and proposals are getting cleared fast. “The revenue of PMC from development charges in a month reflects the positive impact of the reforms. It was in the interest of PMC, developers and customers,” Magar added.

Kharwadkar said that the reforms were being made reposing trust in developers and the real estate industry has to ensure that no one takes unneccessary advantage of the reforms. “If the developers fail on the trust shown, then the entire industry will suffer due to it. We do not want honest developers suffer due to few miscreants,” he added.