New Delhi: The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) plans to implement a new strategy to expedite to process of issuing conveyance deeds, which will give ownership rights to residents of 1,731 unauthorised colonies in Delhi, under the Centre’s PM-UDAY scheme, said Anurag Jain, the vice-chairman of the housing agency.
Since the launch of the process in December 2019, close to 377,636 property owners have registered with the DDA under the scheme of which 54,139 have submitted their applications along with necessary documents till January 22. Of these only 3,634 property owners have got their final documents.
Jain said, “We are working on completely changing the strategy for the implementation of PM-UDAY. We plan to send our own team to the unauthorised colonies so that the initial process, including uploading of documents and the survey of all the properties, can be done simultaneously. Currently, our team surveys the area after we receive applications from property owners.”
In October 2019, the Union housing and urban affairs ministry had notified regulations to confer ownership rights to residents of 1,731 unauthorised colonies in Delhi, which will enable the residents to transfer/sell their properties, avail of home loans and be eligible to demand basic amenities such as water and electricity.
Jain said, “We will also deploy additional manpower to speed up the process. For the new process, we will have to update the software. The entire re-engineered process will be in place by March.”
The DDA, which is the nodal agency for the implementation of Centre’s PM-Unauthorised Colonies in Delhi AwasAdhikar Yojana (PM-UDAY), plans to carry out the property survey at the time of filing of application by property owners. For this, it plans to do the survey colony-wise and deploy additional staff to speed up the process.
Till January 22, DDA has issued 1,716 conveyance deeds and 1,918 authorisations slips, which are the final documents required for registry of property with the Delhi government. Authorisation slip is issued to properties in unauthorised colonies which have come up on government land.
In Raja Vihar and Suraj Park in Rohini assembly constituency, many residents complain of lack of clarity and delay in the processing of their applications for property ownership. Residents in these two unauthorised colonies were the first to get conveyance deed or authorisations slips in January last year, just before the Delhi assembly elections.
Nirmal Singh, a resident of Suraj Park, said he has been running from pillar to post since August last year to get the application processed. Singh’s family had registered with the DDA under PM-UDAY in February last year. “The GIS survey of our property was done in March. Due to the lockdown, we uploaded the documents in August. But since then, there is no clarity on the status of our application. I have made several visits to the DDA office in the area. There are some technical issues with my applications which they are not able to resolve. When I went to the DDA office in December, they told me that there is some problem with the server. We want the application to be processed at the earliest,” said Singh.
Brij Mohan Somani, a resident of Raja Vihar who got the authorisation slip for his property last year, said, “There is a need to streamline the process. A lot of people living in this colony are not well-educated. We want DDA to expedite the process and fix a time duration for clearing each step of the process.”
DDA officials say that the process got delayed a bit last year due to the coronavirus pandemic as field surveys couldn’t be done during the lockdown.
Jain said that in the past few months several measures have been taken to expedite the process. “We have increased the number of processing centres from two to 10 to speed up the process. There are 1,375 common service centres through which people can apply. We have also allowed the GIS agencies, which are doing the survey, to file applications,” said Jain.
DDA officials said that close to 7,000 applications have been rejected as properties are either falling outside the boundary or are located in the O-zone or falling on master plan road etc. The DDA has issued deficiency notes to 13,000 property owners.
Sabyasachi Das, former planning commissioner with DDA, said, “If DDA plans take up the process colony-wise, then it should do a pilot project in one of the big unauthorised colonies to see the response and streamline the process. But the most important thing DDA should focus on is to give a legal tag to the entire authorized colonies by regularising it.”
