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Bhubaneswar city is fast losing its residential areas to crude commercial activities. Bapuji Nagar, perhaps the earliest area developed for middle-class families to live in a planned township is now a disorganised, chaotic commercial area where one gets what one gets in a crowded market -- fast food, Rasagolla, refrigerators, cell phones, pressure cookers, toys, stalls selling live chickens, banks branches, clinics of doctors, beauty parlours, readymade garments, lodging house. Its wholesale transformation to a commercial zone is surprising. One wonders how the surviving families live.
Across the Rajpath is yet another early-planned residential area, known as Ashok Nagar. The situation there is even more chaotic. Saheed Nagar is fast turning commercial. The city seems determined to transform into a sprawling Bazaar that has subsumed many other essential components of a liveable urban life. One sees the market everywhere. One does not get the ambience of College Street where one could get Books of all kinds. Bhubaneswar’s Book stores, small in number, are in hiding.
Different areas were developed for residential use. Residential plots usually of sizes one-fourth of an acre, one-sixth and one-eighth of an acre were created and leased out to eligible families. While most opted for single-storeyed houses, some went for double-storeyed buildings and most plots were used by one or two families. Residents developed gardens, planted trees and lived a contented life. Keeping such land use in mind, urban infrastructure like drinking water pipelines, roads, sewerage, and electricity distribution systems were built. Our planning authorities, however, started permitting high-rise apartments without realising how they were killing decent residential areas. While infrastructure was built for one family, the city planning agency allowed a dozen households on the plot.
These dozen families now exploit the city’s inadequate groundwater resource, the sewerage line now gets overburdened with sewage from more households, and the lanes now get crowded with more vehicles. These households hardly have open space for children to play, for the elderly to walk and for pets to run. The quiet, highly liveable residential areas like Surya Nagar, BJB Nagar, Satya Nagar, IRC Village, and Nayapalli are now getting more and more high-rise buildings with large number of apartments on tiny plots of land. This pattern is followed also in Saheed Nagar and elsewhere. Government have even allowed purchasable higher floor area on such small plots of land. The city needs to be saved from this aggressive commercialisation of small residential plots by banning high-rise buildings on a parcel of land that is less than an acre.
The government must act fast and enforce this discipline. The expanding city surely needs more housing units and high-rise apartments. Real estate developers should be sold large chunks of land through transparent procedures for holistic development and construction of modern residential units with adequate ancillary facilities. Siba Nagar is an area on Brahmeswar Patna Road, about 1500 metres away from Ravi Talkies. A large number of residential houses have come up on duly registered lands but the owners have run into difficulty as the land use has not been changed. Whereas in other places of the city, it is not difficult to change land use where influential people are involved. Hundreds of house-owners now find that their property stands on the land of Lord Lingaraj. There is a widespread impasse over this issue. How the present stalemate helps Lord Lingaraj’s interest is not known.
In many cases, the owners of the house live on the strength of stay orders of the Courts. The law prohibits the registration of such land transactions. Yet purchase and sale of many plots of such lands have been registered. Recently by a strange government decision, many plots of government land were recorded as land of Lord Lingaraj. The government needs government land in the city for many purposes like building hospitals, schools and parks. This important aspect has been lost sight of.
There is urgency in ending the widespread chaos now prevailing. Siba Nagar residents and of similarly placed areas need humane treatment. Land use needs to be changed instead of continuing the stalemate and harassing a large number of people. The lingering issue of Lord Lingaraj’s land in occupation by people and where buildings have been built for years on the basis of registered sale deeds of land should be solved keeping in view the legitimate interest of the people concerned. A reasonable conversion fee may be charged, and the fee may be credited to the Funds of Lord Lingaraj and land records modified in favour of the owners of the plots and houses.
The new Government should break away from the policy of its predecessor by taking recourse to a pragmatic approach and ending the continuing stalemate and large-scale human suffering and harassment. Political leadership needs to supervise this reform process without leaving the task to officials.
(DISCLAIMER: This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are the author’s own and have nothing to do with OTV’s charter or views. OTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.)
