AMC and AUDA have digitized building-plan submission — architects now upload drawings and pay scrutiny fees online. But the actual FSI, setback and height compliance check still happens manually, after you submit. Here's why that gap matters, and what closes it.
14 July 2026 · 6 min read
It's worth being precise about what "digital" means in Ahmedabad's building-approval process today, because it's more than people expect. A Registered Architect or Engineer — CGDCR's "Person on Record" — uploads the building plan directly to the AMC portal. The scrutiny fee is calculated automatically from the submitted plan. TDR fees can be paid online through the same portal. The approval certificate itself, the Rajachitthi, is issued through the digital system.
This is a real and meaningful digitization of paperwork: no more physical filing queues for fee payment or document submission. It's easy to look at that and assume the compliance check itself is automated too.
It isn't. Once a plan is uploaded, AMC's Building Plan Scrutiny Pool (BPSP) — or the equivalent AUDA office — reviews it to confirm the design has left the required margin space and hasn't exceeded the permissible FSI. That review is a human scrutiny officer reading a submitted drawing against CGDCR 2017's tables and clauses, not a rules engine validating it at upload time.
The portal digitizes the *paperwork* of submission. It does not pre-validate the *design* against Base FSI (Table 6.2), Chargeable FSI caps (Clause 6.3.3), TDR limits, setback tables (6.24/6.26), or height-triggered NOC requirements before you submit. That check happens after the plan is already in the queue.
The practical consequence of this sequencing — design, submit, *then* find out — is that FSI overshoots, undersized setbacks, or missed NOC triggers (Fire, AAI, Heritage) surface at the scrutiny stage, after a design has already gone through client sign-off. Each round of that is a resubmission cycle, not a quick fix.
None of this is a criticism of AMC or AUDA's digitization work — automatic fee calculation and online Rajachitthi issuance are genuine improvements over a fully paper process. It's simply that "submission is digital" and "compliance is pre-validated" are two different problems, and Ahmedabad's portal has solved the first one.
India's PropTech sector has been one of the faster-growing corners of real estate tech, with industry research placing the market above the $1 billion mark — but the bulk of that activity clusters around property discovery, brokerage, virtual walkthroughs, and smart-home integration, the parts of the property lifecycle closest to the buyer.
Pre-design regulatory compliance — the FSI, setback, and NOC math an architect has to get right *before* a design goes anywhere near a scrutiny officer — sits upstream of almost all of that investment. It's also the stage where a mistake is most expensive to unwind, because it's baked into the massing before anyone outside the design team has seen it.
This is the gap GeoRule is built for: running the same CGDCR 2017 checks a scrutiny officer will eventually run — FSI waterfall, setbacks, height-triggered NOCs, parking, fire safety — before a design is finalised, not after it's been submitted. Plot boundaries can be pulled directly from the government's own TPVD geoserver instead of re-traced by hand, so the starting geometry matches what the authority already has on file.
To be clear about the limits: GeoRule doesn't submit plans, calculate scrutiny fees, or issue a Rajachitthi — that entire workflow correctly stays with the AMC and AUDA portals, and always will. What it does is give an architect a compliance-checked, financially-modelled design *before* that submission happens, so the first time FSI or setback math gets checked isn't the first time it matters.
This article is for general informational purposes and reflects our understanding of CGDCR 2017 and current AMC/AUDA processes at the time of writing. It is not a substitute for professional architectural advice or verification with local authorities.