BDA to outsource building plan approval process

Real estate stakeholders in the city now have a reason to smile as Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) has decided to outsource the building plan approval process for speedy disposal.

BDA planning member Prashant Kumar Patnaik said, to expedite the plan approval process for construction of commercial and residential buildings in the city, BDA will outsource the job to the private professional entities. The entities will be selected through bidding process.

BDA will authorize the selected process manager with defined scope of service for managing the assignment and shall transmit requisite power/ access for the purpose.

All the applications for the planning approvals are processed manually, for years, by the BDA authorities that is time consuming and cumbersome. Earlier the process of applications used to take more than fifteen months. Now, all applications will be processed within two weeks, Patnaik said.

Tenders for expression of interest for selection of process manager for building plan approval have been floated today, he said. The professional entities will be paid on the basis of plans approved and rejected.

Sources in the department said, presently 1,200 plan applications are lying with BDA for approval. DS Tripathy, president of Orissa chapter of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers' Association of India (CREDAI), welcomed the BDA’s move to outsource the building plan approval process. Tripathy said that BDA is operating with the same amount of manpower for last two decades while the construction activities in the state have doubled leading to inordinate delay in the approval process. With this step more and more projects will be approved resulting in speedy delivery of flats to the consumers.