Pvt realtors may lose their hi-tech township licences

LUCKNOW: Over a dozen private hi-tech townships in the state have come under the radar of the Yogi Adityanath government, which is mulling a proposal to cancel their licence and release the land earmarked for them.

No work or development took place in seven of the 13 proposed townships for which licences were issued to realtors, housing department officials said.

“There is no point on holding on to huge tracts of land notified for these townships in these cities now as the projects have failed to take off even after a decade,” said a senior housing department official dealing with the issue.

He said an estimated 25,000 acre of land was expected to become free if the state government decided to revoke the licences of these inactive developers and denotify the land set aside for these townships.

The move is expected to come as a huge breather for these landowners, mostly farmers, who were unable to sell or undertake any construction on their land as the same was allocated for these proposed hi-tech townships.

The realtors who could lose their licenses include one each in Lucknow, Varanasi, Kanpur, Mathura, Bulandhshahar and two in Agra. Apart from these, Ansal API and Gurv Buildtech, which were given a licence to develop hi-tech townships in Lucknow, could also see their project areas getting pruned at least by half.

The former has already come under the scanner of the government, which has set up a probe after receiving scores of complaints from homebuyers.

The hi-tech township policy to attract investment in the housing sector was formulated by the Mulayam Singh government in 2003 in the wake of increasing housing need and the government’s inability to cater to the demand.

The government had set a target of construction of at least 2.50 lakh housing units by the private players to overcome the shortfall with 10% of the housing units each for the economically weaker sections and the underprivileged.

The policy required a private developer to develop a highclass township with all modern amenities of international standards, on a minimum 1,500 acre of land with an investment of Rs 750 crore.

The townships were expected to have self-reliant units like infrastructure, education, health, information technology, bio-technology, out sourcing and banking.

But more than a decade down the line, the dreams seem to have gone sour.