Draft Master Plan leaves Shopian residents in limbo

Shopian, Aug 07: For residents of south Kashmir's Shopian district, construction in the town has become a Herculean task as seeking building permission often presents shock and surprise to the applicants.

A few weeks ago, the application of Parvez Ahmad, a resident living within the municipal limits of the town, was turned down after he learnt that a piece of land where he wanted to erect a residential structure had been designated as recreation zone as per the Draft Master Plan ( 2032) guidelines.

This left Ahmad exasperated and bewildered as he was unaware of the new zoning changes. Like Ahmad, many residents are clueless about the status of their proprietary land, leaving them in a bind.

“The Draft Master Plan has caused significant confusion and disarray. Now, the officials keep us giving the runaround”, said a group of residents. In 2012-13, a survey for the master plan was carried out and a Draft Master Plan (2032) was prepared by the Town Planning Organisation, Srinagar. However, neither the stakeholders nor the residents were taken into consideration before drafting the plan.

According to the residents, the survey was carried out more or less stealthily and the draft was not made available to the public. Additionally, there were 13 wards at the time of preparing the plan, four new wards —Pinjoora A, Pinjoora B, Meemnader A and Meemander B—were brought under the municipal limits and the people residing in these areas were unaware about the plan, affecting its application.

Adv Ovais Mushtaq Khan, a socio-political activist from the district told Greater Kashmir that there were a host of irregularities in the draft plan. “Firstly, the plan was not prepared in consultation with the administration, let alone the civil society. Additionally, the areas that should have been designated as commercial are proposed as residential,” Khan said.

He said that the draft needed to be revisited and until then people should be governed by building permission as per the old building by-laws. Pointing out the discrepancies in the plan, the Municipal Council Shopian (MCS) on May 21, 2022 also wrote a letter to the District Development Commissioner Shopian, seeking changes in the Draft Master Plan 2032.

According to the letter, the immediate adjoining areas of the arterial roads are proposed as residential areas as per proposed land use, which will not fulfill the key objectives of the Draft Master Plan 2032. “The Draft Master Plan proposes recreational zones in the areas already occupied by residential colonies creating an ambiguity and inadequacy in the plan,” reads the letter.

The letter further says that more than 50 percent of land available in the area is horticulture land and people have also been using it for residential purposes for the last 10 years and “since as the land being proposed as horticulture land in the plan makes it contrary to land use”.

An official, who declined to be quoted, said that many areas like ones falling close to the vital roads should have been designated as mixed zones. The official said that they had received complaints about the Draft Master Plan and they were looking into them.

The official , however, added that the objection were solicited from the residents during the preparation of the plan. A knot of residents whose construction plans were stymied due to the Draft Master Plan 2032 appealed to the authorities for immediate alterations to the plan.