Those who obtained their building permit offline will be given the completion certificates offline, mayor Firhad Hakim said on Saturday.
These will be exceptions from the current system where building permits as well as completion certificates are issued online.
Hakim said this was being done to prevent some difficulties that had emerged while trying to issue online completion certificates to owners of buildings who got their permits offline.
For the past two years, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has been issuing building permits online. Similarly, completion certificates are being issued online only for the last six months.
Many of those who are now approaching the KMC for completion certificates (CC) got their building permits more than two years ago when the KMC was still giving offline permits. Now that the construction of the building has been completed, they are coming to obtain the CC.
“We will issue offline CC to those who took their building permits offline. There are some difficulties that are arising in giving them building permits online. We were asking them to take CC online, but we will not say that any longer to these people,” said Hakim.
A completion certificate is issued after a building is fully constructed. It is issued only after engineers cross-check the building and see that it was building as per plan approved by the civic body.
A completion certificate is necessary when someone takes a bank loan to buy a property.
KMC officials said banks will not offer a housing loan if there is no CC for that property. “There is a risk that the property might be pulled down if it is illegal and banks will not offer a housing loan to any such property,” he said.
An official, however, added that only a few properties have CC as most are built with some deviations from the original plan.
Issuing building permits and CC online was started as part of series of measures KMC introduced to speed up civic services. Online system enables departments to send files electronically and this speeds up the process.
All concerned departments of the KMC and other departments of the government involved in the process of giving permission to building plan can also log in and
see the progress of a file any time.
Officials said even now offline building permits and CC were given to buildings that are old and crumbling and have many tenants. These buildings are erected under special provisions to allow the owner to rehabilitate all tenants in the new building.