PANAJI: Town and Country Planning Board meeting on Friday approved 107 of the 4,000 proposals it had received for zone conversion.
All the 107 approved proposals are related to parcels of land under 1,000 sq mtrs and a majority of them below 500 sq mtrs.
An aggregate of 66,000 sq mtr land will have been converted through the TCP Board’s approval of these 107 individual proposals at Friday’s meeting . The approval for conversion were pending for the last one year.
“Our priority is to clear applications of small land holders who has already done partition”, said TCP Minister Chandrakant Kavlekar. He also said that there were around 234 proposals that were approved earlier by the TCP board.
According to the recent amendment to TCP Act “ which introduced a new Section 16B - individuals got scope to convert orchard land to settlement zones and settlement areas to industrial
development zones by paying prescribed fees.
The amendment however is challenged by the Goa Foundation and Goa Bachao Abhiyan before the Bombay High Court alleging that the provisions vest arbitrary, unguided and grant absolute powers to the TCP for land zone conversion.
The petitioners have pleaded that the purpose of the planned development in Goa would be defeated by the amendments to the TCP Act and the Bombay High Court has in an interim order directed that all conversions done under the new section will be subject to the final outcome of the petition.
Meanwhile the TCP Board in its Friday meeting deferred taking a decision on the Arpora-Parra-Nagoa draft Outline Development Plan (ODP) to the next meeting.
