Delayed: Jacking up floor after floor by paying peanuts

City managers’ reluctant to charge for added stories on existing structures.

ISLAMABAD: City managers are letting up on a potential source of income by not enhancing rates of adding additional floors to existing commercial and residential buildings.

On the direction of a parliamentary panel earlier, the finance wing of the civic body was responsible for preparing a summary of increased penalties for unauthorised floors. However, Capital Development Authority (CDA) Board is still awaiting the authority’s finance wing to submit a proposal.

Delay in the implementation of the proposed penalties have resulted in non-collection of millions of rupees, a CDA official said. The sub-committee of the Senate Standing Committee on Cabinet Secretariat on Wednesday, while expressing displeasure over delay by CDA Board to finalise the decision of revision of rates of additional stories/floors, asked them to finalise the new penalties within a month.

The committee observed that the CDA Board had failed to finalise the new rates even after a passage of seven years. The planning wing official said that CDA Board had forwarded the summary to the finance directorate in May. However, six months later, the directorate is yet to submit the proposal.

The committee also discussed in detail the drastic reduction in fee charged by the authority to allow additional constructions on existing buildings. CDA officials briefed the committee that currently, additional stories on existing commercial building in markets are allowed subject to charges of Rs2,700 per square yard in F sectors and I-8; the rate was Rs7,000 per square yard in 2002.

The rate for G and I sectors is Rs1,800 per square yard; it was Rs4,000 per square yard seven years ago. The rates for additional stories in economy flat sites are Rs1,350 and Rs900 per square yard in F-11 and G-11 respectively.

The meeting was presided over by its convener Senator Safdar Ali Abbasi and was attended by senators Abdul Ghaffar Qureshi and Engineer Malik Rashid Ahmed Khan. The agenda of the meeting was to review the relevant by-laws and inspection/examination of buildings where additional floors were allowed by CDA. The committee was told that across the markets of federal capital, a total of 166 additional floors have been constructed so far, out of which 117 with the approval and 49 without the approval of the authority.

Out of these, 49 illegally constructed additional stories, 25 have already been regularised, while cases of 25 are pending with the building control directorate. The committee also directed the representatives of the chamber of commerce and industry to provide it with the lists of such cases they had submitted to the CDA.

Background

CDA allowed the construction of additional stories on existing commercial and residential buildings for the first time in 1991, but only in the markets of Diplomatic Enclave. Later, in 1995, the privilege was extended to all commercial centres across the federal capital on demand of the traders.

In 1997, CDA Board took back the permission to construct additional storeys on existing structures. But in 1999, keeping in view the acute shortage of commercial areas, permission was granted once again, while a similar type of permission was granted for economy flat sites in sector F-11/1 and G-11/3 in 2004.

The rates were also drastically reduced by the authority in 2004, following the request of representatives of Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and traders associations.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 24^th, 2011.