Govt issues fresh guidelines for clearance of LRS applications, within three months

A special drive will be taken up from the first week of August to clear all the pending applications and regularise illegal layouts and plots within three months span.

Hyderabad: The State government issued fresh guidelines to initiate the process for clearing the applications under the Layout Regularisation Scheme (LRS) announced in 2020. A special drive will be taken up from the first week of August to clear all the pending applications and regularise illegal layouts and plots within three months span.

Principal Secretary for Municipal Administration M Dana Kishore issued orders to complete the scrutinisation of applications for plots in three stages and applications for layouts in four stages. About 25 lakh applications pending since 2020 due to various issues, will be scrutinised and the eligible applications will be sorted out, before collecting the prescribed fee for regularisation.

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An online tool designed by the Centre for Good Governance will help to simplify and streamline the process so that the Revenue and Irrigation departments are kept in loop, and no plots are regularised on water bodies and government lands, the memo issued by the Municipal Administration and Urban Development department said.

Accordingly, system based filtration will be done by the CGG at Level-0, which includes preclusion of prohibitory properties. The LRS applications will be clustered survey number wise and village wise, and each cluster will be given a unique ID. In case of prohibitory properties, an auto-generated message about shortfall will be sent to the applicant, who will be given an opportunity to re-submit the application with documentary proof. The list of applications filtered under prohibitory category will be shared with the office of the Inspector General of Registration and Stamps to prevent registration of such properties.

At Level-1, field verification will be done by a multi-disciplinary team of officials which would include revenue inspector, assistant engineer from Irrigation, and Town Planning supervisor among others. The team will scrutinise the applications against the objectionable lands, including Waqf properties, endowment/inam properties, assigned lands, ceiling lands, court disputes, evacuee properties, FTL lands, nalas, lakes, tanks, heritage buildings and Defence lands. Upon verification, each department will fill the checklist separately and enter the geocoordinates of the plot. Field verification should be completed in three months’ time.

The multidisciplinary team may either recommend/reject/ seek additional information from the applicant. One per cent of the applications which have cleared Level-1 processing will be sent to the Tahsildar concerned for random verification within prescribed timeframe.

At Level-2, the application will be scrutinised by the Town Planning head of the Municipality or Corporation or the relevant authority, for access road width, Master Plan provisions, zoning regulations, open spaces and other technical and planning parameters among others. Fee intimation letters will be sent in respect of applications for eligible plots. Rejected applications will be forwarded to Level-3, which involves scrutiny by Municipal Commissioners or equivalent authorities.

Applications for approval of layouts will be forwarded to Level-4, where they will be verified by Additional Collector (Local Bodies) in the districts, or city planners or Director, Planning in GHMC and HMDA as the case may be.

Besides conducting awareness programmes at district, mandal and municipality level, the officials have been instructed to open help desks at the offices of District Collector, urban local body and urban development authority. The complete process of LRS applications is online, without physical interaction between the applicant and the officials concerned.