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The Hindu : After a long wait of more than 15 years, the Government of Karnataka has come out with its novel scheme of regularisation of irregular land in the entire State under Sakrama 07. We shall examine how people friendly the scheme is.The BDA stopped formation of sites in Bangalore in 1983, thereby denying an opportunity for the residents aspiring to own a site of their own. This continued till 2000. But the city was growing rapidly and the population increased multifold. Thus the demand for residential sites increased enormously. When the demand far exceeded supply there was no alternative for the common man but to buy sites which cropped up in and around Bangalore as revenue sites/unauthorised layouts. In 2005, the Government came out with a notification prohibiting registration of non-converted land. This put a brake on formation of such layouts and high-rise buildings.There were lots of protests on the above order. In order to set things right, the Government came out with its much publicised scheme of regularisation of unauthorised land and gave a preliminary notification on May 19, 2007, under the Karnataka Amendment Act, 2007.One-time measureThe salient feature of the scheme is that any person owning a piece of land/site in a layout other than those formed by BDA/CITB or layouts approved by BDA, has to pay a penalty for various violations and get the same regularised as a one-time measure whether or not such land has been converted as non-agricultural by the deputy commissioner concerned. The scheme was also applicable to buildings within the Bangalore City Corporation limits/BDA sites which had violated some of the listed provisions such as FAR, Zonal Regulations, setback etc. at different rates specified by the Government. We shall restrict our discussion to BBMP areas and residential houses/sites.The Government fixed a penalty varying from Rs. 200 to Rs. 600 per square metre and two per cent of cost of…More