Civic body tries to evolve consensus over building bylaws

The Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) officials on Monday held a meeting with city-based architects to evolve a consensus regarding compliance to building bylaws and iron out deficiencies in the process of issuing various types of certificates to a construction company. RMC invited suggestions from architects to improve the appalling state of affairs in its own backyard.

The meeting was attended by Chief Executive Officer of RMC Prashant Kumar, officials of the town planning department and architects registered in Ranchi in which the issues of completion certificate and occupancy certificates were raised and suggestions were invited.

Architects highlighted bottlenecks in the system of obtaining occupancy certificates and advocated easing the process of obtaining the certificate that is issued based on compliance with the map cleared by the municipal corporation. Nonetheless, deviations in the building from the original map are often cited as the real hurdle in obtaining occupancy certificates. Architects also asked for simplifying the process of obtaining occupancy certificate.

“We suggested that the format of completion certificate should be changed to allow mentioning list of deviations and impacts of it,” said architect Sanjeev Jha. As per the prevailing system, obtaining occupancy certificate is a herculean task as a company has to walk a tightrope and avoid even slightest modification in the original map irrespective of the merit of the deviations made. A construction company has to follow everything from scratch to get the deviations regularised thus complicating the problems of everyone associated with a particular project.

Architects suggested that a two-tier system for completion certificate—first issuing a temporary or provisional certificate highlighting points of disagreement regarding a project with specific deadline to rectify the deviations made and then issuing final completion certificate based on inspections made to ascertain compliance that could be used for obtaining occupancy certificate from the RMC.

The CEO solicited support from architects in improving the rate of disbursement of occupancy certificate and assured that the system will be improved to address grievances. “Architects have to give completion certificates and based on that RMC issues occupancy certificate. Strategy has been chalked for simplifying the process of obtaining occupancy certificate,” said the RMC CEO.