Last month, after the Maharashtra government published its new draft bylaws for the state’s over 117,000 housing societies, it invited suggestions and objections from stakeholders, including residents, their societies and their federations.
According to officials from the cooperation department, over 5,000 suggestions have been received, most of them related to parking, EV charging stations, maintenance fees and curtailing the powers of managing committees.
While the draft bylaws say that any EV charging equipment installed exclusively by a member within their allocated space is the financial responsibility of that member, the suggestions received demand that responsibility be fixed on the society to make the space available, create common charging stations and maintain them.
“The bylaws say that all common parking areas, visitor parking spaces, parking decks and mechanical parking systems are designated as common areas and facilities maintained by the society at its cost,” said another official. “They exclude individual equipment installed by a member. The suggestions we received have demanded categorisation of the open slots, stilt parking and podium parking and requested that they be treated accordingly.”
Maharashtra draft bylaws propose to standardise housing society maintenance charges
The draft bylaws propose to standardise housing society maintenance charges, with common service charges divided equally among flats, while water charges will be based on the number and size of taps or inlets.
Smaller flat owners have objected to the former and pressed for area-wise maintenance. “The bigger flat owners have favoured our mandate which is equal charges from all the flats for common services such as security, electricity, housekeeping and management services,” said the official. “Although owners of smaller flats have objected, it is as per the rules and law and cannot be changed.”
Most suggestions have also pressed for curtailing the powers given to a society’s managing committee. “Many residents perceive the committees as enjoying unfettered powers, including granting NOCs and other sale- and lease-related powers. They have suggested reducing their powers to bring them to a level-playing field,” said another officer.
Joint registrar Shahaji Patil, who leads the committee on bye-laws, said they were expected to be finalised by the first week of October after a few more meetings. “Ninety percent of the work has been completed,” he said. “Most of the suggestions are from Mumbai, MMR, Nashik, and some of them are very good. We accepted the suggestions that are in the purview of rules and laws but the ones that weren’t could not be accepted though they were important.”
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Another officer who did not want to be quoted said that the new bylaws were comprehensive and unambiguous. “For instance, in the case of leakages in flats, there are grey areas in the existing bylaws,” he said. “The bylaws need to be adopted within three months of their publication mandatorily. Even if the societies have to tweak the bylaws in any specific reference, they will need to get this approved by the registrar.”
