MUMBAI, May 30 -- The civic authorities have begun to use artificial intelligence (AI) to scrutinise proposals for the construction of new buildings, aiming to reduce the time taken to process each proposal from about a month to just five days. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) announced the soft launch of its software on Friday. Developed by CivitTwin, the software program will check various compliances in proposals submitted for approval by developers. The process of granting building permissions, both complex and tedious, has so far been handled manually. Each project requires nearly 25 NOCs, with 60 documents along with 450 manual inputs, and could be eligible for more than ten kinds of concessions. Explaining how AI will help, civic officials said the software will, for instance, scrutinise documents including project designs, documents, and even help draft submissions to ensure foolproof submissions. Citing an example, Sunil Rathod, chief engineer with the BMC's development plan department, said, "There are times when an architect is from outside Mumbai and is unfamiliar with the local regulations here. Besides, there are so many court orders applicable and new amendments introduced regularly. This software will help them function within BMC." The new AI-powered facility, which can be accessed via https://autodcr.mcgm.gov.in/bpamsclient2, is currently available only to BMC-licenced architects. It will be made available to citizens at a later stage, when they can submit queries and check the status of their projects' permissions. Despite the use of AI, human intervention will be needed in several areas such as the applicability of FSI regulations to each project; in protected or tolerated structures; cessed or dilapidated buildings; plot boundary conflicts; where setback is involved or where the plot impacts road widening; or for legal disputes. "Every project has unique attributes. These include location-based parameters (funnel zone, near nullahs or railways, defence establishments or in a CRZ zone); or building type (heritage or cessed). Permission will be given after factoring in all these conditions, where applicable, after a field visit," said Rathod. Eventually, the BMC intends to eliminate human intervention. "We had already introduced transparency in 2015, when all file remarks were made available to applicants to identify where proposals were held up. Subsequently, we introduced Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) entirely online. Now, we have taken it one step forward with AI-powered pre-submission compliance and approval simulation for building plan approvals," said Rathod. "The new AI-driven software will greatly facilitate the approvals process. At present, the BMC receives 8,000 proposals a year for new constructions, 70% of which tend to be rejected or returned due to lack of adequate compliances or documentation," said Rathod. "This initiative is part of the ease-of-doing business meant to expedite permissions and improve governance at the grassroots level," said Swapnil Patil, executive engineer with the BMC's Ease of Doing Business initiative....