mumbai in a ruling thats likely to have a farreaching impact on realty projects across the country the national green tribunal has held that fire safety provisions parking spaces and recreation grounds must be included while computing a realty projects builtup area to determine if it needs environmental clearance bringing these municipal issues within the scope of environment approvals for the first time ngts principal bench headed by justice swatanter kumar imposed a fine of rs 3 crore on priyali builders and directed it to halt construction at a slum rehabilitation project at antop hill locality in mumbai the tribunal held that the developer has to pay rs 3 crore under the public liability insurance act and an additional fine for not providing a recreation ground to project beneficiaries it also directed the builder to halt construction and not create any thirdparty rights at the project the ngt had ruled in a case filed by sunil kumar chugh a beneficiary of the slum rehabilitation project and his neighbor who had challenged the environmental approval granted to the redevelopment with a total builtup area of 29150 square metres construction had started in 2009 and environmental clearance was obtained in march 2014 the appellant had moved the court alleging that the builder did not obtain prior environmental clearance and violated regulations by not providing a recreation ground parking spaces and provisions for fire safety the tribunals order ends the malpractice of using only fsi floor space index area and not the total builtup area to evade obtaining environmental clearance according to aditya pratap advocate for the petitioners several builders ducked getting environmental clearance from 2006 to 2011 by passing the projects fsi area as the builtup area and stating that it was below the threshold he said by ruling that builtup area includes both fsi and nonfsi areas the tribunal has made this definition applicable retrospectively from 2006 itself thereby bringing all projects approved thereafter within its ambit if they have crossed the 20000 square metre threshold limit of builtup area pratap said several realty projects allegedly evaded the ambit of environmental clearance by excluding nonfsi areas such as the lift lobby basement areas and staircases while computing the total builtup area of the project