The Hindu : Front Page : This blueprint will cost you dear

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 04, 2007
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This blueprint will cost you dear

Swathi Shivanand

A copy of the Revised Master Plan 2015 is priced at Rs. 5,000

BANGALORE: The two-floor commercial building in front of your house may just go up to eight floors. Business establishments may soon multiply in your quiet neighbourhood. Traffic on the main road that links to your house can get even more dense. Prospective site buyers had better watch out. That dream house you had planned in that idyllic new layout may not have the wonderful park that you fondly imagined your children playing in.

Welcome to the Bangalore of tomorrow, the blueprint for which is contained in the Revised Master Plan 2015, a formidable document of data, graphs and maps in four volumes. Acquiring a copy of this new city bible will take both time and money. The plan costs a hefty Rs. 5,000.

Since Monday, when the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) made the master plan available to the public, people have swarmed into its office on Kumara Park to get their hands on a copy. It comprises the vision document, zoning regulations, proposed land use maps and reports for the 47 planning districts. The BDA sold 256 copies on Monday and 180 copies on Tuesday. Running short of copies, it collected advances and issued tokens to 322 people who can collect the master plan as and when it is available.

Printing of the set of four exhaustive documents has proven to be rather exhausting for the BDA. “We have decided to print all the documents in-house. About 2,000 copies are being printed now,” Town Planning member B. Mahendra told The Hindu on Monday.

Sources in the BDA told The Hindu that the set of documents was being sold at a far cheaper rate than the actual cost of printing one set. Even if the BDA had planned to sell it at Rs. 10,000 as it had proposed to earlier, it would not have been able to break even, sources added.

If you do not know English, your wait would just get longer. Sources said that while a summary of the master plan was available in Kannada, the BDA had not taken up printing of copies in Kannada.

Vinay Baindur of CASSUM, a city-based non-governmental organisation, says “How can you not have the copies in Kannada? How are people at the ward level supposed to decipher it?”

At this cost, it is only organisations and well-heeled developers who can afford its cost. What about the 10,000 citizen’s associations in the city that would want access to the plan? The BDA promises to put the documents online but has not even begun discussions with the National Informatics Centre that will upload the documents for them. Not committing to a time frame, Mr. Mahendra said that it would be taken up “very shortly.”

And if you are one of those who cannot afford a copy but would like a peek at your area on the map, the BDA has made no provision for public viewing. Any doubts about the master plan? Just keep them to yourself as no one in the BDA is available for clarification.

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