Building Plan Approval in Madhya Pradesh: The ABPAS Process, Start to Finish

Madhya Pradesh moved building plan sanction onto the Automated Building Plan Approval System, and the shift changed the nature of the task. Drawings submitted through the ABPAS portal are scrutinised largely automatically against the building bylaws, without an officer reading them line by line.

For anyone who remembers the counter process, this is a real improvement. It is transparent, it is trackable, and it does not depend on who you know.

It is also considerably less forgiving. Software does not accept an explanation. If your drawing does not comply, it comes back — and it will keep coming back until it does.

Here is what the process actually involves for a residential plot.

Before you can apply at all

Three things must be true before a submission is even possible. Each takes real time.

The land must be legally non-agricultural. If your plot is agricultural, you need a diversion order. This is a separate process under the revenue department, it is measured in months rather than weeks, and there is no way to run it in parallel with a sanction application. People lose entire seasons here because they assumed it was a formality.

The title must be clean and current. Registered sale deed, mutation completed in your name, property tax paid to date. A mutation still showing the previous owner will stop the application.

You need a registered professional. Drawings must be prepared and signed by a professional registered with the local body in the appropriate class. The registration class permitted varies with plot size and building height — a larger or taller project requires a higher class of registered architect or engineer.

Documents to assemble

The drawing has to comply, not merely be correct

This is the point at which most first-time applicants are surprised. A drawing can be a perfectly good design and still be rejected. Automated scrutiny checks compliance parameters, and each is either satisfied or not:

• Setbacks — front, rear and side margins, which vary with plot size and the width of the abutting road. A wider road can permit a smaller front setback; a narrow one will not.
• Floor Area Ratio — the total permitted built-up area as a multiple of plot area.
• Ground coverage — the maximum footprint at ground level, a separate limit from FAR.
• Building height — related to road width and setbacks.
• Staircase, corridor and passage widths against the prescribed minimums.
• Parking provision — required off-street parking, dimensioned, at the correct number per dwelling unit.
• Habitable room minimums — minimum room area and minimum dimension, plus light and ventilation openings as a proportion of floor area.
• Rainwater harvesting — mandatory above specified plot sizes across Madhya Pradesh, and it must be shown on the drawing, not merely intended.

Two more that trip people up: projections such as balconies and chajjas are governed separately and may not be allowed to encroach into the mandatory open space beyond a limit, and service structures — overhead tanks, lift machine rooms, stair headroom — have their own rules about whether they count toward height.

What the process looks like

1. Register on the ABPAS portal and create the application for your plot.
2. Upload the drawing in the required digital format, along with the documents above.
3. Automated scrutiny runs against the bylaw parameters and produces a compliance report.
4. Non-compliances are listed. Correct the drawing and resubmit. There is no negotiation step here — this is a loop you exit only by complying.
5. Fees are calculated and paid online: sanction fee, development charges, labour cess and any applicable premium.
6. A digitally signed sanction is issued and downloaded.

Realistically, a clean residential application with correct documents and a compliant drawing is sanctioned in a few weeks. Applications go wrong not in the scrutiny but in the preparation — a missing mutation, an unconverted plot, a drawing that quietly exceeds ground coverage.

After sanction

The sanction is not the end of your statutory obligations.

• Commencement intimation before starting work, where required by the local body.
• Build what was sanctioned. Deviation is the single most common enforcement problem in Indian residential construction, and the consequences run from compounding fees through to demolition of the deviating portion. A deviation also complicates resale, home loans and occupancy.
• Completion certificate at the end. Owners skip this constantly, then discover it is required for a water or sewer connection, for a loan, or at sale — and that obtaining it years later, on a building with deviations, is very difficult.

Sanctions have a validity period. If you do not start within it, you renew.

The mistake that costs the most

Starting construction before sanction, on the assurance that it is coming.

We understand entirely why it happens. The plot is bought, money is committed, the contractor is available, and the sanction feels like paperwork that will resolve itself. But construction raised without sanction is unauthorised from the moment the first course is laid, and regularising it afterwards is far harder and more expensive than waiting would have been.

A note on why this is worth doing properly

Approvals feel like an obstacle. They are more usefully understood as the one point in the project where somebody independently checks that what you are building is safe, legal and will not become somebody else's problem — including your own, when you come to sell.

Our practice has handled sanctions and planning approvals across Indore, Bhopal and the surrounding districts since 1999, including township layouts and colony approvals as well as individual homes. The pattern is consistent: the projects that go smoothly are the ones where the regulatory constraints were known before the design started, not discovered after it finished.

If you are at the plot stage, get the setbacks, FAR and ground coverage for your specific plot and road width confirmed before anyone draws a plan. It is a half-day of work and it shapes everything that follows.