Curation Team
NAGPUR: After more than 13 years, the Nagpur Improvement Trust (NIT) has sent a proposal to Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) to take over around 185 layouts. According to an NIT official, all these are Gunthewari Layouts developed by NIT.
“As per NIT rules, once the layouts are developed, they need to be handed over to NMC, which will maintain the basic civic amenities in these layouts,” said the NIT official, adding that they sent a letter in this regard along with two reminders and are waiting for NMC to take over the layouts.
Sources said that once the layouts are handed over to NMC, the residents will get enhanced civic amenities. “Currently, many of the NIT layouts which have not been taken over by NMC are facing a lack of civic amenities, including problems in garbage collection, maintenance of roads, and others. The residents of these layouts have every now and then raised concerns over the issues,” said sources.
While developing the layouts, the NIT collected development charges from the owners and developed the layouts. NIT builds roads, stormwater drainage lines, sewer lines, water pipelines, and develops open spaces while developing the layouts. “NIT just develops layouts and hands them over to NMC, which is supposed to maintain them and provide further civic amenities to residents. Many of the layouts we developed are over 10 years old and face maintenance issues. We too sometimes carry out the maintenance work, but as per rules, we have to hand it over to NMC,” said an NIT official.
Apart from the 185 layouts, NIT has also almost completed development of another 406 layouts, which will also be handed over to NMC in the coming days. Before this, NIT has handed over 233 layouts to NMC along with 214 private layouts and 61 EWS layouts in 2011. The NIT has also handed over 79 open spaces in these layouts to NMC. Before 2011, NIT had handed over 126 layouts in 2001.
When the Gunthewari Act was introduced in early 2000, the intention was to regularise 1,900 and 572 layouts created haphazardly by builders and developers. To streamline this, the state govt had introduced the Act to regularise these undeveloped layouts.
