All sub-assistant engineers of the Kolkata civic body’s building department will have to upload pictures and provide detailed information about any illegal construction on a mobile app that has been created.
The exercise is scheduled to begin on Monday.
The engineers were trained on handling the mobile app — KMC Employee — on Saturday.
Sub-assistant engineers (SAE) are supposed to do rounds of a ward under their jurisdiction and identify illegal constructions.
Once an engineer logs in to the app, it will identify the location where the engineer is visiting.
Sources said the app would help monitor if the engineers were going around in their wards in a bid to identify illegal constructions.
Uploading the pictures on the app will also ensure that it is electronically stored in a place, which can accessed later.
The decision to use the mobile application comes in the wake of the collapse of an under-construction building in Garden Reach that killed 12 people.
A section of engineers, however, questioned whether introducing a mobile application would solve the problem.
They said there were huge vacancies in the posts of sub-assistant engineers and unless the vacancies were filled, it would be difficult for the sub-assistant engineers to identify all unauthorised construction.
An engineer of the building department of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said there were 93 sub-assistant engineers for 144 wards of the KMC.
“This is inadequate. There needs to be one sub-assistant engineer for each of the 144 wards,” said an engineer of the building department.
A sub-assistant engineer, who attended the training, said they were asked to take pictures of any under-construction building they came across in the ward.
If the building is being built according to the approved plan, the engineer should write in the app that there is nothing illegal about the building.
In case of illegal construction, the engineer has to mention the address, the premises number, the owner’s name and whether portions of the building were unauthorised or if the entire structure was being built illegally.
A standard operating procedure prepared by the KMC following the collapse of the Garden Reach building has made it mandatory for engineers to inform the police when an illegal construction is identified.
Once engineers of the civic body identify an illegal construction, they have to serve a stop-work notice to the owner or the builder.
A copy of the letter should be sent to the officer in charge of the local police station, the deputy commissioner of police of that division and the joint commissioner of police, headquarters, in Lalbazar.
Fortnightly coordination meetings between Kolkata Police and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) to “counter” illegal construction and “take preventive/corrective measures” have resumed from Thursday, after a break of several years.
The officers in charge (OCs) of all police stations and executive engineers, assistant engineers and sub-assistant engineers from the city’s 16 boroughs are supposed to attend the meetings.
