After it was discovered that the top seven stories of an eight-story building in Khar West were constructed illegally, the Bombay High Court ordered the removal of those seven stories. The Shivanjali Co-operative Housing Society at Dr. Ambedkar Road has seven illegal levels. The court ordered the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to remove these floors within three months.
The structure included a basement, ground floor and eight upper storeys, but the Commencement Certificate (CC) issued for it was only for the construction of the ground level, according to papers cited by the division bench of justices Mahesh Sonak and Kamal Khata. Rao & Associates and AG Developers worked together to jointly create the skyscraper in 1993.
Rafique Kabani, a resident of the building’s eighth floor, filed a plea with the court to overturn a June 2018 notice from the BMC’s H/West ward office ordering the removal of the building’s seven illegal storeys. Kabani had requested that the demolition notice be quashed and that the BMC be temporarily prevented from carrying out the destruction.
The petitioner claims that on September 12, 2017, the society received a show cause notice that listed just six violations; however, the June 2018 order sought to demolish seven levels of the structure, which was not included in the show cause notice. For this reason, he requested that the June 2018 demolition order be overturned due to a violation of natural justice.
The building could not be regularised because it was built using surplus floor space index, the court stated in dismissing the petition.
The court stated that regularisation is only applicable in exceptional circumstances and that parties who flagrantly with impunity violate building or environmental standards would never profit from regularisation.
Source: Hindustan Times
