DTCP to Recover Rs 12,500 Demolition Cost in Gurugram

GURUGRAM: The Department of Town and Country Planning has started billing owners for the cost of knocking down their own unauthorised work. More than 200 properties that have already faced demolition in licensed colonies are in line for recovery notices of Rs 12,500 each, and more than 20 owners have already received them.

Officials said the fee is meant to ensure that the "burden of enforcement does not entirely fall on the department." Machinery, labour and the time of enforcement teams, in this view, should be paid for by the person whose extra room or stilt conversion was taken down.

The notices sit on top of a wider drive. DTCP has been issuing show-cause notices and restoration orders in Sushant Lok, Ardee City, South City and other licensed residential areas, then sealing or demolishing where the violation is not removed. District town planner (enforcement) Amit Madholia has said the department is acting against plan violations, occupation-certificate gaps, illegal commercial use of houses and encroachments on road land. Guest houses, paying-guest rooms, parlours, gyms and property offices operating from residential plots have been on that list.

The Rs 12,500 figure is a flat recovery, not a compounding fee and not a penalty for de-sealing. It is the department's estimate of what each demolition costs it. Owners who wanted a one-time regularisation window will read it as a second hit: first the structure goes, then a bill arrives. Officials say the alternative is that the public pays for private illegality.

Samhita, a Sushant Lok 1 resident, welcomed the recovery. She said repeated violations had eaten into roads, parking and the character of residential colonies, and that violators should not expect taxpayers to fund the removal. Abhinav Kumar, a DLF 1 resident, asked how the amount had been calculated and whether it would apply uniformly to every property that has seen action, including older constructions that stood for years under uneven enforcement.

That last point will travel. A flat Rs 12,500 is easy to administer and hard to explain if one house lost four stilt rooms and a rear setback while another lost a small ramp. DTCP has not, in the latest briefing, published a cost sheet showing how the figure was derived. It has said notices will go to all properties where demolition has already been carried out.

The drive is also running into the political demand heard the same week at the Mini Secretariat, where DLF and Old Gurugram owners asked for compounding instead of demolition. Recovery of demolition costs moves the file in the opposite direction: the violation is removed, and the owner pays for the removal. For licensed colonies that have lived with extra floors and commercial misuse for a decade, that is a change in tone, not just a change in the challan amount.

Enforcement teams are still in the field. Owners who receive the Rs 12,500 notice will have to pay or contest it. The department's stated aim remains restoration of sanctioned plans and the road right of way, with the cost of that restoration now attached to the property file.