No one knows where Rs 1,700 crore in conversion charges went

NEW DELHI: MPD21 allowed traders carrying out commercial activities in certain residential areas to continue so long as they paid a ‘conversion charge’. The three municipal corporations have collected more than Rs 1,700 crore in the past decade under this head. The corpus so collected was earmarked for infrastructure development, especially for erecting parking facilities and for developing markets.
Today, Praveen Khandelwal, general secretary, Confederation of All India Traders, sums up the perplexity of paying traders when he asks, “Where are the parking lots? What infrastructure development have they carried out in the last 11 years? Where have they spent the money?”
Traders were supposed to pay the conversion charges when the use of the property changed from residential to commercial under the mixed-use policy of MPD21. “The money collected was to be kept in a separate account and used exclusively for infrastructure development in markets and to meet parking requirements,” added Khandelwal. “We will take the corporations to court if they don’t use the money for purpose it was meant for.”
Puneet Goyal, commissioner of the south corporation, retorted, “We are indeed using the said money for the construction of parking lots and redevelopment of markets. There seems to be some miscommunication. SDMC will take up 30 parking projects in the next 18 months. As for market redevelopment, we have cleared the proposals for redeveloping 80 markets and more markets will be considered.”
While the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Delhi planned close to 40 multilevel and stilt parking projects, very few of these came to fruition. Most of them were proposed under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, and the scheme’s scrapping later dried up the source of funds.
The South Delhi Municipal Corporation started eight multilevel parking projects, of which four are complete while the rest are running three years behind schedule. The North Delhi Municipal Corporation also proposed to construct several underground and multilevel parking facilities, but none of them have moved from the drawing board. Several were aborted after JNNURM was scrapped. Of the 19 parking lots it planned, just four are functioning today. Of the four, the two in Chandni Chowk see regular use, but the ones in Kamla Market and Model Town are vacant most of the time.