In 2014, the Ministry of Railways announced ambitious projects to modernise and upgrade major infrastructure and services. The Station Redevelopment Programme is one of the largest modernization efforts to transform more than 8,500 railway stations across the country. The Indian Railway Stations Development Corporation Limited (IRSDC) announced the framing of Unified Building Design Codes (UBDC) for station areas under its purview.
This is a huge opportunity to move from a generalised set of byelaws to one that offers flexibility in terms of building use, adopts new principles of energy efficiency and Transit Oriented Development (TOD) guidelines. Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation is supporting this process by facilitating technical assistance to the IRSDC for creating the UBDC for railway station areas.
The UBDC will be integrated with the online building approval system, thereby increasing transparency and reducing the overall time required for approvals. Several roundtables ( the most recent being in December 2019) have already been held between experts and officials of IRSDC in substantiating the development of frameworks and formats for Regulating Layout Plans and Property Development Cards. Together, these documents will lead to the development of Form Based Codes for respective station areas to ensure ToD on railway land.
The Regulating Plans will be an evolved version of the traditional “Layout Plan”. They will shift the emphasis from a ‘land use discourse’ to ‘a discourse on optimum street grid and sub-plot sizes, sustainable mobility infrastructure, green area networks, public space network and availability of interchange facilities’. The Property Development Cards contain an inventory of the minimum mandatory requirements for development on Sub-Plots and aim to lay foundation to shift from ‘two-dimensional generalised building-by-law discourse’ to a ‘volumetric- site specific development norm discourse’. These in combination will address one of the biggest challenges faced in implementing ToD principles in India.