Goemkarponn desk
PORVORIM: Town and Country Planning(TCP) Minister Vishwajit Rane today ruled out possibility of scrapping the controversial section 17 (2) of the TCP ACT which seeks to allow ad-hoc and arbitrary conversions of privately owned plots in the Regional Plan.
Rane also refused to give any assurance on section 16 (B) of the TCP Act that allows zone change, stating that the matter is pending before the High Court and is likely to come up for hearing on Tuesday, August 8.
The Minister was cornered by the opposition MLA- Vijai Sardesai and Venzy Viegas.
Viegas demands on the floor of the house to produce proof that survey numbers that are corrected under 17(2) were wrongly zoned in RP 2021. He also questioned who made the error and if the error was on Government part while the applicants are charged.
“All the survey numbers that are corrected under 17(2) were settlement according to RP2001, what was your base plan to do the correction as per 17(2) & How did the government establish that the zoning of these plots was an inadvertent error?” He said.
Rane, refusing to get into the details said that a detail report on the RP 2021 errors and who were involved in those errors is already tabled in the House.
“People are looking for relief from those errors and we are facilitating it through this section,” he said.
Minister also refused to scrap 16 (B) as demanded by GFP MLA Vijai Sardesai, who moved a private member bill to repeal it.
“You people called the section as scam. So I demand to scrap it. I had introduced it with right intention but it turned out to he ATM for some,” Sardesai said.
Responding to it, Rane said ” you (Vijai) was the one who got that amendment and now he wants it to be scrapped. But we can’t take any decision as the matter is in Court,” he said.
