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Journalism of Courage
The width of a road in front of Adarsh housing society has stoked a new controversy. While the roads width in the official record is 18.40 metres,the actual road width was found to be 10 metres when the judicial commission,appointed to probe the Adarsh housing society scam,visited the building.
Questioning this discrepancy in its report placed before the state legislature Friday,the commission has cast a doubt on the possibility of it being a deliberate act to increase the permitted height for the buildings construction.
In cases where the road width is less than 18 metre,development control (DC) norms restrict the height of the building to 1.5 times the road width. This is not applicable in cases where the road width is more than 18 metre.
There is a possibility the road width was never 18.40 metre. But in order to give benefits of DC norms and ensure that restriction of height ceased to apply,the width was inflated, the report states,adding the only other possibility was that the society illegally encroached on an additional 8 metres of the roads portion. The commission has said the then urban development principal secretary Ramanand Tiwari,an accused in the scam,said his department did not check the actual road width before granting permissions.
