Maken said, “Residents have feared demolition of the fourth floor because they did not take the ground floor into consideration. The ground floor is, in fact, the first floor.” He added demolition of the fifth and sixth floors will continue.

Maken said courts have accepted the provisions in the Masterplan 2021 in which fourth floors of buildings which do not exceed 15 metres have been regularised. He said the Masterplan has further relaxed height limits for group housing societies, allowing them to be constructed up to 18 floors. Houses or bungalows on individual plots are allowed to be 15 metres high, a few metres above the earlier 11.5 metres as laid down in Masterplan 2001.

Maken also said the stage has been set for regularising unauthorised colonies, barring the more affluent ones. He said, “We have issued fresh guidelines to the Delhi government on October 5, 2007. They will have to draw up a list of the colonies to be regularised. This list has to be verified. In July 2004, the first aerial survey of Delhi was made and we found that many of the 1,539 colonies to be regularised did not even exist. A second survey will be conducted now to determine the exact number of such colonies. There is not much data on this. Unauthorised colonies built till March 2002 are eligible for regularisation.”

He also said the revised guidelines has relaxed certain requirements which were “impractical” like doing away with the state government’s rule that all service plans of the area (of water and power supply lines, sewers etc) would have to be submitted before it by local associations of residents (RWAs). Maken said, “This is impossible for residents. We have asked concerned agencies, like discoms for power, to provide service plans.”

It was also mandatory earlier for RWAs to submit plans on how to utilise the 15 per cent earmarked in colonies for utility institutions like schools, dispensaries etc. Maken said, “How can residents do so much planning? The DDA will have to do it.”