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A building that violates Bengaluru’s construction rules cannot be made legal simply by paying for additional construction rights, the Supreme Court has said in an interim order that bars the use of Premium Floor Area Ratio (FAR) to regularise unauthorised construction.
A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, along with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana, on Tuesday, September 22, issued notice to the Karnataka government on a petition challenging the Premium FAR scheme. The state has been given four weeks to respond.
The court directed that Premium FAR cannot be used to regularise unauthorised construction. It also said that any clearances granted under the scheme in the meantime will be subject to the final outcome of the case. The court has not stayed the Karnataka High Court’s June judgment, which had upheld the scheme.
At the heart of the dispute is a simple question: can a property owner pay for additional construction rights after exceeding the permissible construction limit?
Floor Area Ratio, or FAR, determines how much floor space can be built on a plot, depending on its size and other planning conditions. Premium FAR allows property owners to purchase additional construction rights by paying a prescribed charge. Under Bengaluru’s regulations, additional FAR can go up to 60% of the ordinarily permissible FAR, depending on the width of the road abutting the property. The scheme applies to properties on roads wider than nine metres, subject to prescribed conditions.
The petitioners, led by Citizens Action Forum (CAF), argued that the framework could effectively provide a means to regularise buildings that had already exceeded their sanctioned limits.
The Karnataka High Court had rejected the broader challenge to the scheme in June. It held that Premium FAR was distinct from Akrama-Sakrama, a scheme introduced in Karnataka to regularise certain unauthorised constructions and land-use violations in return for a fee. However, the High Court also observed that a person who had constructed beyond what was permitted could potentially purchase additional FAR and bring the building into conformity with the amended regulations.
It is this possibility of using Premium FAR to cure an existing violation that the Supreme Court has now barred while it hears the case.
The court’s intervention comes at a time when Bengaluru is already grappling with the consequences of construction in violation of planning rules. In 2024, a TNM investigation found that BBMP’s enforcement against illegal buildings often stopped at issuing notices. Experts had also pointed to deviations from sanctioned plans and changes in FAR as some of the ways in which builders were able to add floors and expand structures. The investigation noted that rapidly developing areas were already under pressure from traffic, sewage and water-supply demands.
More recently, the Greater Bengaluru Authority told the Karnataka High Court that nearly half of the 5,000 paying guest accommodations inspected in east Bengaluru were operating without proper licences, sanctioned building plans or fire-safety clearances. The areas inspected included Indiranagar, Whitefield, Mahadevapura and KR Puram.
The findings came less than three weeks after a five-storey PG building collapsed in Delhi’s Satya Niketan, killing seven people. Investigators have been looking into the construction of additional floors and repair work allegedly carried out without permission at the building. The incident has once again brought questions around building permissions, unauthorised construction and enforcement into focus.
In Bengaluru, the debate over Premium FAR also raises questions about how much additional construction the city can accommodate and how that growth is being planned for.
“We do not have a valid master plan. The last master plan expired in 2015,” architect Prem Chandavarkar told TNM, referring to Bengaluru’s urban planning. “For lack of any alternative, it still governs building approvals,” he said.
Chandavarkar also said that weaknesses in the city’s planning system have contributed to the growth of unregulated layouts and unauthorised construction.
In 2024, a Bill seeking to amend the town planning law to provide a statutory framework for Premium FAR was withdrawn after the Governor raised concerns about its implications, including the possibility of unauthorised construction being legalised. The scheme subsequently continued under the existing legal framework, and the Karnataka High Court upheld it in June 2026.
For now, the Supreme Court has not decided on the overall validity of the Premium FAR scheme. Its interim order is limited to preventing Premium FAR from being used to regularise unauthorised construction while the case is pending. The Karnataka government has been given four weeks to file its counter-affidavit.
