Face2News/Chandigarh
The merger of fifteen villages into Municipal Corporation, S.A.S. Nagar (Mohali) has been widely welcomed, but there is need for further clarity on several issues concerning them, said KBS Sidhu, retired IAS officer who superannuated as Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab. KBS Sidhu has written to the Chief Secretary, Punjab, seeking a consolidated clarification from the government.
“The extension of Mohali’s municipal limits to these fifteen villages, notified on 28 November 2025, has been generally welcomed,” KBS Sidhu said. “Landowners see the promise of planned infrastructure and rising land values. What is missing is an authoritative word from the concerned administrative departments on what actually changes, day to day, for a family that wakes up one morning inside a Municipal Corporation instead of a Gram Panchayat.”
The two departments concerned — the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Local Government — have each spoken, piecemeal, to their own corner of the matter, KBS Sidhu noted. One, through the CLU, EDC and Licence Fee rate notification of 4 June 2025 and the withdrawal of the short-lived Unified Building Rules on 27 April 2026; the other, through its 24 November 2025 instruction directing municipal bodies, including Mohali, to apply those rates. “Between them, that may settle what is intended,” KBS Sidhu said. “It does not settle what people actually interpret, and that gap leaves room for unnecessary ambiguity and potential litigation.”
Four queries, in particular, are being raised by residents, for which KBS Sidhu said he has found no authoritative answer.
First, whether the three-year property tax exemption given to newly added municipal areas in 2014 has been extended to the fifteen villages of November 2025.
Second, the fate of MGNREGA job cards and PMAY-Gramin eligibility, which lapse automatically once a Gram Panchayat is dissolved, with no transition circular yet issued to affected households.
Third, whether an ordinary rebuild of an old house within Lal Lakir or abadi deh needs to go through the same full-fledged building-plan scrutiny, and pay the same Rs 45-per-square-metre scrutiny fee, as new construction elsewhere, since the Bye-Laws’ simpler self-certification route is available only to buildings forming part of an approved layout plan, which most abadi deh parcels do not have.
Fourth, and more an institutional or legal question than one that touches residents directly, is the shamilat — village common land. This land is legally vested in the Gram Panchayat to be used for common purposes of its residents. When a village’s entire area is absorbed into the Municipal Corporation, the panchayat ceases to exist and this land passes to the Corporation along with its other assets. “Nothing in that transfer obliges the Corporation to keep using the land for the erstwhile village, as the panchayat was bound to,” KBS Sidhu said. “This valuable land needs to be ring-fenced for the villages from which it came, rather than being sold or otherwise absorbed into general city development, leaving the very community that once owned it in the doldrums.”
The same question, KBS Sidhu said, applies equally to villages merged in earlier phases, such as Sohana and Kumbra in 2014. He added that village common land takes more than one legal form, some of which may not vest in the Corporation at all, and that sorting this out cleanly needs the Revenue and Rural Development and Panchayats Departments — where KBS Sidhu has himself served, as Financial Commissioner Revenue and earlier as Administrative Secretary — to work together with the departments already named. “A wider legislative clean-up may eventually be warranted,” he said, “but that is a matter for the whole state, and should not hold up the immediate clarification Mohali’s villages are owed.”
“This is not an exercise in politics,” KBS Sidhu said. “It is a matter of genuine public interest. The people of these villages have asked good-faith questions and deserve a good-faith, authoritative answer — not five different departments each answering a fifth of the question,” KBS Sidhu concluded.
Punjab
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