What is difficult to accomplish; building a house, or getting a permission from the concerned government agencies to construct a house. No guesses if you are a resident of Kashmir. It is far more easy to construct a house than to get a permission for it. So lengthy, and tedious a process to acquire this permission breaks your back, before you actually plan of breaking ground for the house. There is a slew of No Objection Certificates that you have to acquire from a dozen departments that should reach the actual authority before it grants permission. Add to it the difficulties of the red tape, the sloth, and the usual practice of getting harried if you don’t grease the palm. It has become ridiculous that you have to go to each single department that is involved in this affair for constructing a house at a place that is full of already built houses. Rather than identifying areas for the purpose of building houses, the government makes each house a separate target for permission. This defeats the purpose of monitoring the housing pattern in the valley. So tedious a process is better to be evaded, more people finally think in such terms. Pay a few bucks to the vigilant eyes of the department on ground and none objects to your construction till it is complete. Once complete, it is taken for granted , that no one does anything. But the one who honestly wants to follow the process is dissuaded and discouraged by the process itself. In such a situation when the top official says that there is need to “simplify the building permissions regime in the state’, it comes as a pleasant surprise.
At a conference organised to get feed-back from the stakeholders to put in place an efficient and formidable framework for Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in housing, this statement made by the chief secretary is more than welcome. If it really happens and people get permission easily, it would be like pulling off a miracle. Right now only those who are pursuing the thing know how tough the going is.