By: Sunil Dahiya, Managing Director, Vigneshwara Developers
Real estate developers are often blamed for delay in projects. But the fact of the matter is that it is more often the state parties that are responsible for the delay in project. If there is a single window clearance, you will get a single authority which is competent to give you a license. It is there in telecom, banks, Insurance companies etc. it is there in every other business vertical except real estate. Whereas developers have to get 40 NOC’s followed by permissions.
All these permissions are carefully worded to be called ‘No Objections’. So in that case there is no onus taken on by that the particular department. If a fire takes place, the fire department says we have just given them a NOC, the electricity department should see to the design so it’s their fault. Apparently we are in the ‘No Objection’ regime; we are not in the permission regime.
If you go to any department and ask them what is the standard format for permission. The reply would be that “there is no permission, only NOC”. You go to the airport authority; they give you NOC for height of the building, not permission. In such a case what are you regulating if you are not permitting anything? You can regulate something you take onus about, which you take responsibility of. But no government department wants to take than onus. They just want to regulate but not permit.
The concerned department only comes for inspections. They have regular powers to see, regular powers to attach, regular powers of all the instrumentalities a state can exercise. For instance, environmental clearance is given to a project. It is a clearance, not a permission to operate. So very easily they can say we are withdrawing this clearance, at any given point of time. Take for example big projects like Posco, their environmental clearance was withdrawn without giving any clear reason.
There’s a very strong public liability for a developer, because there’s a very strong public interest which gets created into projects. Government and authority should resort to cancellation and revocation of permissions very diligently and should consider it as the last resort before making any project unviable.
