Civic Body To Confirm The Truth Of Facts Of Prohibited Buildings Given By Building Branch

Almost unable to put a check on culling of prohibited buildings in the city of Patiala in spite of making grave attempts, the city’s municipal corporation has now made a decision in order to verify the statistics of prohibited buildings developed by the building division of the civic body.

In a printed message to all sub-divisional officers (SDOs) functioning in the civic body, city mayor Amarinder Bajaj on May 25 informed them to carry out reviews in each and every zone, for which they have been allotted the work of expansion.

“The sub-divisional officers of all our divisions will examine the regions and verify the prohibited buildings. After that, we will interrogate the data made by the building division,” Amarinder said.

Though, the building division functionaries have been appointed with the aim to keep an eye on the coming up of such edifices, recently, the facts and the data offered by this division has been detected “suspicious”.

Especially, in case of a multistoried edifice on Bhupindra Road next to the City Centre market, where Amarinder Bajaj’s office sensed a rat in the coming up of this edifice and the second tale of the edifice was destroyed by the civic body following the orders of Bajaj on May 24.

In the same way, there have been reports of the involvement of a “few functionaries” of the building branch with the owners of the illegal buildings, that is why these officials allegedly give a wrong information about coming up of these buildings to the mayor or the commissioner’s office.

“In a lot of cases, the data given by a few building branch officials has been found wrong. Many a time, a few functionaries have been found giving incorrect data just to defend the unlawful building possessors,” said Bajaj.

The sub-divisional officers have been inquired to provide data by May 30. “Afterward, we will fix the answerability of every building branch administrator and will hold him accountable for any new prohibited accumulation to the buildings,” the mayor said.

Sources in the building branch of the corporation added that it was doubtful that any summation or novel building can crop up in Patiala without the data of the building division, as the inspectors of this branch have to make frequent checks of the regions allotted to them.

In spite of the check, such buildings have turn up in Patiala in big numbers posing a grave threat to the projected growth of the city, regardless of bringing serious losses to the civic body.