more-in Starved of revenue sources, the city Corporation has been looking forward to an increase in the compounding fee for the regularisation of unauthorised constructions. But, the rates put as part of the Kerala Municipality Building (Regularisation of Unauthorised Construction) Rules, 2018 by the Local Self Government department last week comes as a blow to the local body, as the government has reduced steeply the compounding fee for unauthorised constructions in municipal areas. The Local Administration Department had decided to regularise the unauthorised buildings constructed before July 31, 2017 after levying a fine. But compared with the existing rules for regularisation, for unauthorised constructions up to March 2013, the rates have taken quite a fall. For instance, the compounding fee to regularise an unauthorised telecommunication tower and its ancillary structure was ?5 lakh per tower. This has now been reduced to ?1.5 lakh. For single family residential buildings, there was a basic compounding fee of ten times the permit fee and one-twentieth of the fair value of the land multiplied by the total floor area. For residential buildings up to 300 square meters, the fee was 50 percent of the above. The fee has now been done away with for residential buildings up to 60 sq.m. For the rest of the residential buildings up to 300 sq.m, this has been put into three slabs of ?3,000, ?20,000 and ?30,000 each. But for other buildings (including commercial) up to 100 sq.m, the rates which were twenty times of the permit fee has been reduced to ten times the permit fee now. There is also reduction in the addition compound fee for deficient car parking in case of violations for off-street parking under rule 34 of the building rules. In the existing rules, this was fixed as ?5 lakh per deficient car parking. Now, this fee has been divided into three slabs. If a minimum of 50% of the parking specified is available, the rate is only ?3 lakh per deficient cark parking. If a minimum of 25% of the parking specified is available, the rate is ?4 lakh per deficient cark parking. Only in cases where the available parking is less than 25% of the parking specified, the rate is ?5 lakh. The application fee in each category has also been reduced. “We were certainly expecting an increase in the fees for regularising unauthorised constructions. Maybe, the lower slabs will attract more people to pay up and regularise their constructions, thus contributing to the increase in revenue,” said a Corporation official.

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