For example, a proposal from A ward in Colaba could be assigned to a fire officer in G North ward, which includes parts of Dadar and Mahim, for sanction. Officials explained that this measure serves two purposes: first, to eliminate any suspicion of favoritism, and second, to evenly distribute the workload among officers, preventing any one officer from being burdened with an excessive number of proposals to sanction. Each year, the civic body gets close to 1,500 proposals seeking some kind of fire brigade NOC.
Seeking permissions from the BMC has always been tedious and time-consuming, sometimes raising questions about the long delays. The fire NOCs must be granted within a time-limit and officers should not be allowed to prolong the process. Hopefully, the new systemfor fire brigade NOCs will streamline and speed up the approval process.
Under the new system, Mumbai has been divided into three zones — city, eastern, and western. An ADFO is responsible for scrutinising the papers while the DFO scrutinizes the plans. The final approval comes from the deputy fire officer.
Joint municipal commissioner in-charge of the Mumbai Fire Brigade, Ramesh Pawar, emphasised, “The implementation of such a system is in line with BMC’s Ease of Doing Business model. Randomisation in proposal assignment was already practiced at the sub-engineer level in building proposal department. However, since August 1, we have extended this approach to Fire Brigade NOCs as well. To maintain efficiency, we have confined the randomisation process within each of the three regions. This way, in case of a site visit, officers won’t be inconvenienced by travelling from the city to a distant suburb. Randomisation will prevent monopoly of officers. We have also started issuing estate NOCs online.”
Shirish Sukhatme, past president of PEATA (Practicing Engineers, Architects and Town planners Associations) said that it was on their associations request only that randomisation of assigning proposals was started. “Most of the proposals in today’s time seeking NOC’s are of wards like F North (Matunga) and D ward (Taredo, Malabar Hill) where per sq feet prices are over Rs. 1 lakh. In such a case all the creamy proposal are going to one officer only and they keep piling up. There have been difficulties at the Deputy CFO level and hoping with this system these issues will get ironed out,” he said.
According to architect Vilas Nagalkar, it is important that proposals which are being recieved remain faceless. “The name of the architect should not reflect anywhere so that while giving a sanction there is no kind of bias in mind,” said Nagalkar.
