Maharashtra Governor directs PMC to offer a feasible solution over Rs 20 crore development charges

Bhagat Singh Koshyari, Maharashtra Governor and Chancellor of Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), has directed the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) to bring an agreeable resolution on account of Rs 20 crore development charges slapped on SPPU for taking up construction works on its campus. On failing to pay Rs 20 crore, the PMC had denied completion certificates for several buildings that had been already constructed but since lying unoccupied.

Before this, the PMC had sent the university Rs 200-crore bill, which was later reviewed to Rs 20 crore. The SPPU countered by asking for a compensation of Rs 1,100 crore from the PMC for all the land relocated to the civic body for carrying out the development works from time to time, over many decades.

Standing firm to not clear the development charges, for the time being, SPPU establishments said as the university land is possessed by Raj Bhavan, no construction on such a government-owned land should be levied any kind of development charges.  

In a fresh meeting with the Governor at Raj Bhavan, it was said that Koshyari has asked the PMC to see the new buildings on the SPPU campus as government property, and hence not impose any development charges on the university.

The SPPU was built on land earlier held by the Raj Bhavan, which is possessed in the name of Governor of Maharashtra. A few hundred acres of this government land was relocated to the SPPU, erstwhile known as the University of Pune when it was founded in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the matter related to land ownership had not been fully elucidated.

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