The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is planning make the building permission approval plans online. If it is implemented, the applicants need to send their applications for building permissions online and the entire approval/rejection process will be generated electronically using the software, as mentioned by the officials.
This kind of online system is already in practice by many civic bodies of Mumbai, Pune, Thane, Coimbatore, Thiruvananthapuram, Nagpur, Bangalore and Chennai. Now, GHMC is planning to get software to scrutinize and approve building permissions from an IT firm.
In general GHMC staff takes 2 long months for giving approval to non-high rise buildings and three to four months for high-rise permissions. Since the verification of all the submitted blue prints is being done manually, GHMC on an average gives approvals to 8,000 to 10,000 buildings, in the city every year. With the online system, officials are planning to reduce the approval time to one week and thus saving time and increasing the number of approvals.
Moreover, this new system can also reduce the chances of human error in scrutinizing plans and calculation of fee, as in the past, several cases were detected where staff had collected more building fee than the required amount. The newly suggested software is more robust and it can automatically read and identify building plans and layout objects from the drawing. If the plan is not in accordance with the rules, it directly rejects the plan by specifying exact reasons. If this software is used, manual intervention is required only for verifying the documents and for field inspection at the site. The officials are planning to use both Telugu and English reports for making them user friendly and also to increase the transparency in approvals.
Source: The Times of India