Thursday, January 17, 2013

Bengal plans new land acquisition policy

LandThe West Bengal government is planning to come up with a new policy for land acquisition that would be specifically meant for land owned by private individuals or groups.

Since the auction route for land allocation is not favouring builders who are facing acute shortage of land for new development, the government has planned to create new policy.

Earlier, the government had planned to relax norms under the Urban Land Ceiling Act (ULCA) and eventually gave up which disappointed Bengal real estate developers. Developers had demanded relaxation of ULCA norms in case of housing projects reserve 25 percent of housing units for LIG.

The West Bengal government has come up with a new land policy for government-owned land. Under this policy, the land parcels will be allotted for commercial use through auction route, against the earlier mode of a tendering process. Under the policy, land for housing meant for low income group (LIG), poor or economically weaker sections (EWS) are exempted from auction.

But the realtors are not particularly contented with the exemption. Owing to limited land bank with the state government, the government is unable to unlock much land for real estate development. And adding to this, the auctions that are going to be held may increase the rates, said developers.

To meet the prevalent demand for residential real estate sector, the available government-owned land is insufficient. The new land policy is of not much benefit to builders. And therefore the developers have been asking for a new urbanization policy to address the issue, and they have already submitted their demands to the government.

As the new land policy is not likely to solve the problems surrounding land issues in the state, the developers are being optimistic about the upcoming urbanization policy.

According to ULCA 1976, the ceiling limit on vacant land in a category ?A? city like Kolkata is 7.5 cottah or about 500 square meters. This is another major concern of developers in developing township projects in Kolkata and other parts of the state.

West Bengal is among the few states in India that have a legislation like the ULCA. The demand for relaxing the ULCA norms was raised for the first time by the chairman of Godrej Properties at an industry meet.

And later during??Bengal Builds? summit on real estate sector that was held in November 2012, real estate developers had strongly demanded lenient laws and sops governing real estate development in the state. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, had ruled out any concessions to the developers due to the poor financial condition of the state.

The chief minister had also announced the formation of a task force to examine the obstacles for urban infrastructure development in Bengal, focusing at formulating a new urbanization policy.

Related Real Estate News:

Centre to build e-way to connect Delhi and Ludhiana

Gujarat?s affordable housing on hype

Central govt hikes financial aid for rural housing scheme

Source: http://www.commonfloor.com/news/bengal-plans-new-land-acquisition-policy-41620

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