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Town planning

(1) All the developments in the City like (i) Building construction for various purposes such as residential, Commercial (Commercial Complexes, Hospitals except Theatres), industrial and School buildings etc. (ii) Sub divisions of plots where the No. of plots are less than 8 plots and extent of the land is less than 3000 meter square (iii) Layouts of lands which can't be covered by sub-division, are needs to be approved by two acts called T&CP Act(Tamil Nadu Act 35 of 1972, 1974) and CCMC Act. Section 56 of T&CP Act & Sections 234 & 238 of CCMC Act are the sections which necessitates of getting approval for all the developments in the city.

(2) For the city the above two acts are being enforced by two different departments (i) CMDA (ii) Chennai Corporation. CMDA is enforcing the T&CP Act by rules called Development Control Rules and the Chennai Corporation is enforcing CCMC Act governed by building Rules revised upto 1972.

(3) Chennai Corporation is issuing building permits to all the buildings including CMDA`s special buildings, multi-storey buildings and layouts after taking over the land left over for road portion and the land reserved for open space reservation etc. after the planning permits issued by CMDA.

(4) In addition to the above building permits the Chennai Corporation, Town Planning Dept. is issuing planning permits also by enforcing T&CP Act following Development Control Rules under the delegation powers given by CMDA for certain categories (i) ordinary buildings in residential i.e. the buildings with Ground + one floor with four dwelling units (4 Kitchens) (ii) ordinary buildings in commercial i.e Ground Floor + One Floor within 3000 sq. meter (iii) Industrial and School buildings of unlimited area and (iv) sanctioning layouts upto 2 hectares.

(5) The Chennai Corporation is sanctioning both planning permit and building permits for only the categories mentioned in para 4. Applications can be ade for these categories in the respective zonal offices of Corporation of Chennai directly.

(6) In view of making it convenient to the public to get their plan sanctioned in their local area itself now all the sanctioning processes are being decentralized to the respective Zones of Corporation of Chennai. Hence all the applicants or Licensed Surveyors can apply their applications in their respective Zones for all type of applications which comes under purview of the Corporation of Chennai.

(7) Also to make the processing of the applications easier the whole system of processing of files are computerized. Due to this the applicants can apply the application in short time by giving a filled data sheet with required particulars and can obtain the computerized acknowledgement immediately. Since every stage of the processing of the applications are being entered in the Computer the applicants can see the various stages of their applications in the online itself by referring the application Nos. allotted to them. Integrated Nos. are being allotted for the whole Corporation in series as per, application type wise like Planning Permission Application (PPA), Demolition application (DA) and Sub-division application (SD) etc. On seeing the stage of the application in the online according to the stage, the applicants can react immediately i.e if the stage is that the plan is pending due to calling some details the applicant can furnish the reply for the queries raised in the " letter to party" immediately or if it is sanctioned, the advice to pay the necessary fees will be available on the system, so that the applicant can make the payment immediately and get the computerized permit copies at once.

A system is developed to store the copy of the plan in the Computer, so that the applicant can get the true copy of the sanctioned plan in future even after so many years. For this the applicant should produce one extra copy of the plan so that it can be stored in the computer immediately after sanction of the plan.

The plans are to be prepared and signed only by the Architects and the Engineers who has obtained license from the Corporation of Chennai. There are 725 such licensed surveyors are in the list of the registered license surveyors.

For the convenience of the applicants (1) the list of Licensed Architects and Licensed Engineers are displayed Annexure-I in the online with their names, address with contact Nos. The applicants can make use of this facility to avoid the mischief's done by the touts who are not authorized for preparing the plans and signing both plans and applications.

The type of applications which can be applied directly in the respective zonal offices Corporation of Cennai are also available in the online (annexure -II) to know the categories of the applications which comes under purview of the Corporation of Chennai.

CITY ENGINEER