Nine Villages Included for DDA Land Pooling Policy

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The Delhi government has notified nine more villages, including Narela, as development areas for the implementing the land pooling policy, which was notified by DDA in 2018 with the aim to provide planned development and close to 1.7 million dwelling units in the urban extensions to meet the housing requirement in the national Capital. With the latest inclusion, the total number of villages chosen for land pooling will go up to 105. The nine new villages are: Bankner, Holambi Kalan, Bhorgarh, Khera Kalan, Kureni, Mamoorpur, Narela, Mubarakpur Dabas and Barwala. These villages, which fall in the Delhi Development Authority’s planning zone P-I, are in addition to the 95 villages that were urbanised and declared development areas in 2017 for the implementation of the pooling policy. There is one more village (Naya Bans or Iradat Nagar in northwest Delhi) which is yet to be notified. All these villages are located in the urban extension areas of the city. The villages have been declared as development areas, there are some portions of land parcels which have been excluded from the notifications. Areas where a government project has been approved, forest land, gram sabha land transferred to the government’s revenue department, green belt land, etc are excluded from the notification. A key objective of the land pooling policy was to do away with the complexities in land acquisition by making the land owners a direct beneficiary of the planned development. So far, the land owners have submitted 6,930.4 hectares to DDA for pooling. However, the agency is yet to operationalise it. This has led to calls for implementing land pooling expediently. Bhupinder Bazad, president of Master Plan committee of Delhi Dehat Vikas Manch, an association of land owners in Delhi villages, said DDA should expedite the land survey and planning. “It has been pending for a long time. We want DDA to expedite the survey and planning process so that people in these villages will be able to participate in the land pooling policy,” said Bazad. The land-owning agency is planning to develop three model sectors to operationalise land pooling in Bawana’s sectors 17, 20 and 21, Pooth Khurd and Sultanpur Dabas villages.The entire area is divided into 109 sectors and on an average each sector is about 250Ha to 350 Ha and is anticipated to accommodate a population of about 80,000 to 100,000. The notification for Narela village, one of the three sub-cities planned by DDA, will help in planned development of the area. While land was acquired for the sub-city, some areas couldn’t be acquired after the new Land Acquisition Act (Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013) came into force. Now, we can plan for the area’s development in a better manner, as we are already working out the details to develop the sub-city as a commercial and institutional hub. The land-owning agency has invested heavily in the area with over 25,000 housing units ready or in various stages of construction. The DDA has been struggling to sell its residential units in the area for the past six years. Last year, the land-owning agency hired a consultant to prepare a development plan for the Narela sub-city for effective utilisation of vacant land parcels available with DDA.