Gurgaon: What is stilt parking meant for? Cars, you would say. But in Gurgaon’s upscale colonies, they are quality of life enhancers. In DLF 3, stilt parking has been repurposed as private entertainment areas that house bars, home theatres and projectors.The most striking case was found in a stilt-plus-four building on a roughly 1,000-square-yard plot, where about 500 sq m of the stilt floor — sanctioned to remain open for parking — had been built up instead. The enclosed section housed a projector room, bar area, bedroom, drawing room, lift lobby and additional toilets. Officials have since demolished the unauthorised structure.The conversions have come to light during an intensified enforcement drive by department of town and country planning (DTCP), which followed high court scrutiny of violations in the city’s licensed colonies. The department is now examining nearly 500 stilt-plus-four-storey buildings across DLF phases for similar unauthorised construction — making the recent action potentially only the beginning of a larger exercise.District town planner (enforcement) Amit Madholia, who led the action, said the department’s position was unambiguous. “The stilt area cannot be enclosed and used for rooms or other activities beyond the limits prescribed by building regulations.”In the latest crackdown against unauthorised construction, demolitions were carried out at seven houses in DLF Phase 3.The department has also warned prospective buyers to verify sanctioned building plans before purchasing additional rooms or constructed areas offered as part of a residential property.The action was part of a wider sweep in which four buildings in DLF Phase 3 were sealed for alleged unauthorised construction and commercial activity, and roughly 1.5km of encroached road right-of-way was cleared.The enforcement drive has also exposed unauthorised paying-guest and guest-house operations running out of residential properties. At one site, officials found two additional floors beyond the sanctioned structure being used to run a 28-room PG facility. Another property was operating as a 10-room guest house, complete with a laundry and dry-cleaning facility in the basement. At a third site, 36 rooms were found at an advanced stage of construction.Amita Sethi, a floor owner at the property where the large stilt conversion was found, told officials the additional construction had been built and sold to them by the builder — who, she said, is no longer responding to their calls.Stilt parking exists to keep vehicles within the plot, freeing the residential floors above for habitation. Once that open area is enclosed, the parking capacity it was meant to provide disappears, and the consequences extend beyond the individual property.Deepak Kumar, a resident, said that when stilt parking is converted into rooms, the vehicles that should have been accommodated inside the plot end up parked on the street instead.The conversions are also easy to miss from outside. A building may look like a standard residential property while the space beneath it has been substantially altered. Residents say this hidden potential — extra usable space without buying another plot or building a new structure — is precisely what makes stilt conversions attractive in a market where every square metre carries a premium.What amounts to infrastructure in conventional terms becomes, in DLF 3’s high-value market, a substantial economic asset — creating a strong incentive for owners and developers to extract value from space that was never meant to be habitable or commercial.The crackdown has surfaced a broader fault line among residents. Some, including Kumar, argue that unauthorised construction and commercial activity are straining roads, parking and civic infrastructure, with every extra room or operation adding more occupants, vehicles and demand on already-stressed systems.Resident Sameer Puri has raised similar concerns about the extent of commercialisation in the locality and the impact of large PG and guest-house operations on the neighbourhood.DLF 3 has become an important rental market for employees working in Cyber City, Udyog Vihar and other nearby business districts, and the availability of PG and rental accommodation has made the area attractive to a large working population. Residents and activists remain split on how the govt should respond — between those seeking strict enforcement and those arguing for a more practical rental-accommodation policy.Four buildings have been sealed and unauthorised stilt structures demolished, but the scrutiny of nearly 500 stilt-plus-four properties across DLF phases is still under way. That exercise will determine whether the DLF Phase 3 case is an isolated violation or part of a far wider pattern — and, more broadly, how much of the city’s ‘extra space’ was ever legally sanctioned to begin with.
