Ghaziabad New Master Plan Opens More Housing near Expressways

The city’s new master plan will open up more areas for residential use along the expressway and the rapid rail corridor as town planning increasingly focuses on development around transit points to help residents live closer to work or public transport access points. The new residential areas will be carved out of agricultural land and so too will be land for industrial and commercial purposes. According to the Ghaziabad Development Authority (GDA), the plan is in its advances stage of preparation and will soon be sent to the state government for approvals. Master Plan-2021 will lapse next year. The projections in the new Master Plan are that about 10-15 hectares each of residential land will be made available in the area plans for Modinagar, Muradnagar and Loni, while about 50 hectares will be made available for Ghaziabad city. “In all, we will have about 90-95 hectares of residential land available for group housing or plotted development and most of this land will be converted from agriculture land use. Ancillary activities like commercial and industrial will also be earmarked from the agriculture land use. The MP-2031 is more or less ready and will be implemented from 2022 to 2031. We expect a growth of about 1 million more people in the next 10 years,” said Asheesh Shivpuri, Chief Architect and Town Planner of GDA Ghaziabad’s population currently is around 4.5 million. A master plan is a broad layout of a city and clearly lays out different areas as per their land use like residential, commercial and industrial among others. The new plan takes advantage of the geographic information system framework to analyse spatial location and all details will be made available online. As per officials, about 42% of total land use in a master plan for the city will have to be marked for residential use, while 5% would be for commercial land use and 7-8% is earmarked for industrial land use. “The housing development will either be taken up by GDA or by private sector. Once the land use is defined, it will also be accompanied by infrastructure development like roads, highways, etc.,” Shivpuri added. The officials expect that with projects like the regional rapid transit system (RRTS), Delhi-Meerut Expressway, Eastern Peripheral Expressway and Delhi-Dehradun highway, the city will attract more homebuyers.Developers said that new areas have huge potential for housing development as places like Indirapuram and Vaishali are almost saturated.