Mysuru: The Mysuru Urban Development Authority (MUDA), which is haggling with farmers over the issue of sharing sites, has now planned to auction its 2,500 stray and intermediary sites to mobilise resources. In some proposed layouts, discussion with the farmers has reached the dead-end and MUDA is waiting for government intervention.   

The cash-starved MUDA is struggling to develop new layouts to distribute sites to aspirants and this is further complicated due to land litigations in newly-developed layouts, paucity of funds to create infrastructure in proposed layouts where MUDA and land owners are partners.

Though MUDA is ready to develop new layouts partnering with farmers under 40:60 ratio (40 percent of the sites for land owners and 60 percent for MUDA) but a majority of farmers are demanding 50:50 (equal for both) ratio.  Under this formula, no compensation will be paid to those giving away their lands since they will be getting developed sites that are ready-to-sell.

In new layouts, 16 sites can be formed in one acre after leaving out space and earmarking roads, drainage, UGD, power lines, parks, open space, Civic Amenity (CA) sites and corner sites.

The partnership project is essentially to cut the chances of litigations and also to extend benefits of urbanisation to the original land owners. As per this formula, MUDA has to create infrastructure like water connections, underground drainage, power line, roads, and other facilities.

MUDA needs money for all this and it has now planned to raise money by selling stray and intermediate sites, according to sources. MUDA has identified more than 2,500 stray and intermediate sites in various layouts it had developed since its inception.

MUDA that took up this operation to identify such sites relied on its own documents and by collating details of sanctioned sites and cancellation, encumbrance certificate, registration of property and other records. The entire exercise took one month and MUDA could round off 2,500 sites.

As per government order issued in 2007, there is provision for MUDA to sell 75 per cent of stray and intermediary sties by auctioning and it can allot the remaining 25 per cent sites to outstanding personalities in various fields and other special categories.

As per MUDA’s calculation, each stray and intermediary site can fetch Rs. 35 lakh going by the present market rate of Rs. 2,000 per square feet and according to this, MUDA can raise money up to Rs. 875 crore.

In addition, MUDA can also generate another hundreds of crores of rupees by auctioning cancelled CA sites for violation of norms. It can also raise funds by auctioning or re-allotting MUDA houses to applicants.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And so it seems with MUDA which has now decided to auction stray and intermediate sites to raise money for development of new layouts.

Of late, MUDA is facing severe shortage of land and people have accused it of failing on its basic function — to identify and provide land for residents of Mysuru. There are more                                                                                                                            than one-and-a-half lakh pending applications from site aspirants since the last 30 years and the number of applicants has only increased.

So far, MUDA has been able to complete the process of allotting land at R.T. Nagar and Lalithadrinagar Second Stage that were proposed 15 years back only in December 2017.