DNA | Housing min bats for FSI upgrade in megacities

Sep 17,2017

To address the issue of land scarcity in the country, even as rapid urbanisation takes over, Hardeep Singh Puri, the housing and urban affairs minister, on Saturday directed a review of the Floor Space Index (FSI) and Floor Area Ratio (FAR) for all megacities.

He also batted for a dense and vertical growth of cities, stating that it would benefit citizens as well as urban mass transit systems in development. He added that increasing urban land availability was imperative to meet the affordable housing demand.

According to the Census, between 2001 and 2011, India's urban population has grown by 32 per cent as compared to only 18 per cent growth in the country's total population. Projections suggest that by 2031, this population will have multiplied by 600 million.

To tackle this, government think-tank Niti Aayog in August drafted a three-year action agenda drafted and recommended that urban spaces be expanded manifold by relaxing the permitted FSI, which it stated, was extremely low at present, ranging from 1 to 1.5.

Elaborating on the negatives of a restrictive FSI, the report also compared Mumbai and Shanghai. "In 1984, Shanghai had only 3.65 square metres of space per person. But, the Shanghai Municipality then decided to make liberal use of the FSI. Despite large increase in population since 1984, by 2010, the city had increased the available space to 34 square metres per person. In contrast, in 2009, Mumbai on average had just 4.5 square metres of space per person," it states.

Referring to the action agenda, Puri has now asked officials to take up a time-bound review of the norms in all 53 cities with a population of one million and above to push for urban development.

He made these observations this while addressing senior officials from different states and chief executives of Metro Rail Corporations from across the country at a National Dissemination Workshop on New Metro Rail Policy.