The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has tweaked its building rules and allowed construction of parking space over and above the permissible limit for construction in projects with a built-up area of 1 lakh sq ft or more, civic officials said.
Every plot or land has a limit up to which construction is allowed. Also, the KMC’s building rules specify how many parking slots will be mandatory for a given number of flats in a building or a housing complex.
Any parking space beyond that would eat into the total built-up area allowed to the builder. That will not happen now.
After the tweak, more parking slots or garage space will be allowed over and above the permissible limit for construction on a plot.
Every plot is granted an FAR (floor-area ratio), based on which the KMC decides how much construction can be allowed on it. The higher the FAR, the more constructed space allowed.
“Earlier, mandatory parking space was not included in the FAR. But now considerable parking space will be allowed to be built without considering it part of the FAR,” said a senior KMC official.
“Only large residential complexes with a built-up area of 1 lakh sq ft or more will benefit from the change in rules. Such complexes usually have around 100 flats or more, each of at least 1,000 sq ft,” said a KMC official.
The tweak, however, will not allow construction of unlimited additional parking space. A circular issued by the KMC said additional parking space would not be more than 40 per cent of the mandatory parking space required for that plot.
Parking space constructed beyond the 40 per cent cut-off will be considered part of the FAR for the plot.
If the additional parking space is taken out of the FAR, builders will have the freedom to construct more dwelling units.
A senior KMC official said the building rules had the provision to allow construction of additional parking space outside the FAR for the plot, but the parameters were not defined.
“The circular has defined how much additional parking space will be allowed outside the FAR and what kind of residential projects will get the benefit,” the official said.
Some of the other conditions that a builder has to fulfill to enjoy the benefit are that at least 50 flats in the project should be more than 1,076 sq ft or 100 sq m in size, the parking area cannot be used for other purposes later, the mandatory car parking should be covered and 5 per cent of the additional parking, too, should be covered. There has to be a provision for charging electric vehicles in 50 per cent of the parking area.
“The decision was taken after we received an application for construction of additional parking space outside the FAR. This was allowed by the building rules. We decided that instead of giving permission to one, there should be a uniform rule,” the official said.
The matter was discussed by the building committee of the KMC and the changes were made effective.
An architect said the tweak should have been done keeping in mind residential projects of smaller size, too.
“Nowadays almost everyone with a 1,000-sq ft flat has a car. If this benefit was available to smaller buildings, it would have benefited more people,” he said.
But the KMC official said smaller buildings would not have the adequate space after adhering to other building rules to provide for so many covered parking units.
