Building Plan In Softform
Coimbatore Corporation Town Planning Officer M. Soundararajan( left) taking a look at the features of AutoDCR. The Coimbatore Corporation announced on Wednesday that a new system under its e-governance will enable scrutiny of building plans in one week to a fortnight and eliminate the present delay of anywhere between three months and over a year. Plans will be submitted to the Corporation in a compact disc (CD). The entire process will be paperless. Only the original print of the approved plan and the non-digitised site-related documents will be in hard copy.
The Corporation will use AutoDCR (expanded as automatic scrutiny of Development Control Rules). Introduced by Pune-based SoftTech Consultants Private Limited, the software has been acquired by the Builders Association of India, Coimbatore Property Developers Association, Association of Consulting Civil Engineers and Institute of Architects. They have sponsored it for the Corporation.
A press release from Corporation Commissioner V.K. Shanmugham said on Wednesday that Coimbatore was the first city to introduce this system in South India. Town Planning Officer M. Soundararajan said the concept was first introduced in Pune. It was being used in Thane and Aurangabad (in Maharashtra). The official said New Delhi and Chennai had recently called for tenders for this system. The software enables checking every aspect of a building plan with rules. If any portion of the plan was rejected, the AutoDCR would specify which rule it did not conform to, Mr. Soundararajan said. The processing of applications would be done with the Building Plan Applications Management System.
The Commissioner’s release said the system would eliminate interpretation errors, manipulations and ensure transparency in scrutiny and approval. First, the paper work would be reduced and then eliminated, Mr. Soundararajan said. The only hard copy would be the print of the approved plan that should bear the signature and seal of the approving authority. As for cross-checking at the site of construction at a later date, the Corporation field engineers would be provided with a personal digital assistant (PDA). It would contain all the points that needed to be verified. Whether the construction conforms to rules could be made a note of against each of the criterion loaded in the PDA. Even a photograph of the structure could be taken and uploaded in the Corporation’s system.
The system itself would alert the officials on the date and time of site visits. An automatic alert would be sounded and the message would reach both the engineer and the promoter, so that they were both at the spot at the fixed time. The system would provide customised reports to various sections, such as Local Planning Authority, Corporation or even the office of the Commissioner of Municipal Administration.
Though the Corporation had begun the process of accepting plans on CDs, it would not turn away people bringing manual prints. But, it would ask them to bring a soft copy also. This approach would be adopted up to the last week of June, till people were fully aware of the new system. From June-end, plans only in CD would be accepted. “The introduction of the system has to be gradual,” says Head- Business Development of SoftTech Rakesh Kumar Singh. The system would be on internal trial in the Corporation till May 22. Training would be held first for licensed building surveyors as they were the main stakeholders.
