The demand for regularisation of nearly 1,800 unauthorised colonies, where around 50 lakh people have been living, has been a key issue in Delhi politics for over a decade.
In past elections, the Congress and the BJP promised to regularise these colonies in a bid to woo the sizeable chunk of voters residing in these areas and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) too followed the same line.
The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved a proposal to grant ownership rights to the residents of the unauthorised colonies, a move that comes months ahead of the Delhi Assembly polls that are due early next year.
Ahead of the assembly elections in 2008, the then Congress-led Delhi government had issued provisional regularisation certificates to unauthorised colonies. However, the process was stuck as their mapping could not be done.
According to an official, the entire process of regularisation was to be coordinated and supervised by the Delhi government.
The official said that delineation of boundary of unauthorised colonies is the starting point of the process as per regulations.
However, the Delhi government could not delineate the boundaries of these colonies even after 11 years of issuance of the regulations and sought more time up to 2021 to complete this exercise, the official added.
When the BJP-led central government had formed a panel headed by Lt Governor Anil Baijal in March this year ahead of Lok Sabha elections, the AAP had slammed the saffron party.
In a tweet in March, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had said that ahead of the 2014 elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made the promise to give ownership to the residents of unauthorised colonies.
"...Why did Modi not do it in the last five years? Since the past 20 years, BJP and Congress have been fooling people of these colonies on the same lines," he had said in his tweet.
An official in the Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry said that people living in these colonies did not invest in safe structures and the government could also not create any social infrastructure as the colonies developed without approved Layout Plan (LOP).
"In the absence of basic amenities, the residents of these colonies are living in uninhabitable conditions. Though the Master Plan Delhi-2021 allows for redevelopment of colonies with 50 per cent additional Floor Area Ratio (FAR) as an incentive, no redevelopment has taken place so far as the residents do not have ownership rights," the official said.
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