The Delhi government has decided against giving ownership rights to property owners in unauthorised colonies, thus paving way for their sale and purchase, a separate exercise to determine the boundaries of such colonies and finalising their maps will continue simultaneously.
The revenue department of the Delhi government will help in providing land records to the Delhi Development Authority who will then carry out a survey. Drones and remote sensing devices will be used to do the survey which will help in determining the total built-up area. On Thursday, the Delhi government official said that the survey will take place separately and will not affect the regularisation of colonies and granting ownership rights to the residents.
Satellite images will also be taken into consideration to analyse the actual extent of construction up to the cut off date of January 1st, 2015, the officials confirmed. Community centres, parks, and schools will be built in those vacant areas. The official also explained that in the latest technology, the land records are fed into drones through special software. The drones take a sortie over the desired area and take real-time images, which are superimposed on the shizras, or the traditional maps, of the colony.
Its been over a decade now that the exercise of determining the boundaries of unauthorised colonies is going on. The urban development department had asked the residents’ welfare associations to submit the layout of the colonies that had applied for regularisation during the span of the earlier Congress government. Even the maps had to be cross-verified with the satellite images. The work, however, could not be completed.
It was after the Supreme Court directed the Aam Aadmi Party government in 2017 to carry out the survey in a time-bound manner and complete the process by September 2019 that the urban development department swung into action and started a survey through the total station machine (TSM) method. The survey, however, failed to accurately demarcate the boundaries of these colonies.
The Delhi government subsequently decided to use drone technology and even carried out a sample survey in a south Delhi Colony. It, however, hadn’t taken it forward due to a lack of domain knowledge.