No parking on streets within 500 metres of new lots…..Shalini Nair
State won’t scrap parking FSI policy, but new permissions put on hold
The state government has ruled out any immediate plan to scrap the parking FSI policy, but it has also decided to put on hold any further permissions for parking FSI in the Island City while continuing to allow such proposals in the suburbs.
Acting on a masterplan prepared by the BMC, the state has asked the civic body to disallow on-street parking within a 500-metre radius of all proposed parking lots in the Island City. “Since there is a concentration of proposed parking lots in the Central Mumbai belt, we have directed the BMC to develop those first and in co-ordination with the Traffic Department ensure that there is no on-street parking within 500 metres,” said a state government official.
The Urban Development Department had mooted a proposal to scrap the parking FSI policy during the tenure of former chief minister Ashok Chavan. Government sources said the proposal, however, was sent back without the CM’s consent. While BMC has been instructed not to sanction further proposals for use of parking FSI in the Island City, real estate analysts point out that as long as the policy continues to exist on paper, developers can still continue to take benefit of the additional FSI in their specific cases.
In October 2008, the state government had introduced a new Section 33 (24) to the Development Control Rules (DCR) which allowed new constructions on a plot over 1000 sq mts in the island city and over 2000 sq mts in suburbs a FSI of up to 4 if the developer constructs over 50 parking lots and hands it over to the BMC. The same clause also said that a committee under the BMC commissioner, Joint Police Commissioner (Traffic) and MMRDA Commissioner would “earmark/select the plots for public parking on the basis of their suitability and seek government’s approval for it”.
However, rather than the need for creating parking infrastructure dictating its implementation, government officials themselves admit that the policy deteriorated a FSI generation exercise. A majority of the proposals amounting to 20,000-odd parking lots were approved in the lucrative South-Central mill land belt. “In many cases, developers proposed that they would give some inaccessible corner of their plot for creating parking merely for the sake of the additional FSI,” said officials.