Behind the Drawings: How Sumana Kumar's Team Prepares a Sanction Set

If you own a plot in New Town or Salt Lake and you have started asking around about building on it, you have probably heard the phrase "sanction set" thrown about in a way that makes it sound like paperwork, and that framing costs plot owners more money than almost anything else in the process. A sanction set is not a formality that an architect produces at the end to satisfy a clerk, it is the drawing package that fixes your building's footprint, your setbacks, your floor heights, your staircase width, your parking layout and your usable carpet area, and once it is stamped and approved, changing any of it means going back and re-submitting.

So the honest way to think about it is this: the sanction set is the moment your house stops being an idea and becomes a legally defined object, and whatever mistakes are baked in at that stage tend to follow you all the way to handover.

We have been running Studio Contour out of New Town since 2014 and have delivered 330-plus buildings across New Town, Kolkata, Salt Lake, Rajarhat and greater Kolkata, and in that time our team under principal architect Sumana Kumar has taken residential and commercial projects through the NKDA, KMC and Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation sanction routes often enough that the pattern of what actually goes wrong is very familiar to us. This piece is an operator's view of what happens inside our studio between the day you hand over your deed and the day a stamped drawing set goes in, because plot owners deserve to know what they are paying for.

What a sanction set actually contains, and why each sheet exists

People imagine a sanction set is one plan and one elevation. In practice, for a typical G+3 or G+4 residence in New Town, the package we assemble runs to a site plan showing the plot with its exact dimensions cross-checked against the deed and the physical survey, a key plan locating the plot within the block and action area, floor plans for every level including the roof, at least two sections cut through the staircase and the wet areas, elevations on the road-facing sides, a parking layout with drive aisles and turning space actually drawn to scale rather than assumed, a drainage and sanitary layout, and an area statement that adds up plot area, ground coverage, built-up area per floor and the resulting floor area ratio.

The area statement is the sheet that decides whether your set clears or bounces, right, because it is the one the reviewing officer can check arithmetically in about four minutes. If your ground coverage percentage or your FAR consumption is even marginally over what your plot category permits, no amount of good architecture on the other sheets saves you, so we lock the area statement first and design the house inside it, never the other way round.

The catch here is that most of these sheets are interdependent. Move a staircase by 300mm to gain a bedroom and you have changed the section, the landing headroom, the parking clearance underneath and possibly the FAR, so a sanction set is less a stack of drawings and more a single interlocked model that happens to be printed on several sheets.

The two weeks before we draw anything

Our team does not start drafting on day one, and clients sometimes find this frustrating until they see why. The first stretch is verification, because the single most expensive assumption in Kolkata residential work is that the plot is exactly the size the deed says it is.

We physically measure the plot, we check the road width in front of it since permissible height and setbacks key off that, we confirm which side the sewer and water connections come from, we look at what the neighbours have already built and how close they sat to the boundary, and we pull the plot's own history where records allow. On a fair number of plots we find a discrepancy of a few inches to a couple of feet between deed and ground, and finding that in week one is a design constraint while finding it in month six is a re-submission.

We also fix orientation early. Kolkata's climate does not forgive a badly oriented house, so we are looking at where the south-west afternoon load falls, where the summer breeze comes from, and whether the plan can be shaped for real natural ventilation rather than depending on air conditioning in every room. For families who want the plan to also follow Vastu Shastra principles, this is exactly the stage to say so, because vastu-compliant planning that is baked into the first layout costs nothing extra and vastu retrofitted onto a sanctioned plan costs a great deal.

How we build the rule envelope before the design

Before a single room is placed, our team draws what we internally call the envelope, which is the three dimensional volume left over once every applicable rule has taken its bite out of the plot. Front, rear and side setback lines come off the boundary, permissible ground coverage caps the footprint, the FAR figure caps total built area, and height limits tied to road width and floor count cap the top.

What is left is your building, and honestly, that shape is where the design conversation should start, because a client who sees the envelope on day three understands instantly why the studio is saying four bedrooms comfortably or five bedrooms tightly, instead of hearing it as an architect being difficult.

We keep our own working notes on the FAR and ground coverage rules that apply in New Town and we walk clients through them in plain language, because the rules differ between the NKDA area and Salt Lake and the older KMC wards, and a plot owner who bought in one and is being advised by someone experienced only in another tends to get an envelope that is optimistic in the wrong direction.

The drafting stage, and the details reviewers actually look at

Once the layout is signed off, the set gets drafted properly, and this is where experience shows up in unglamorous ways. Staircase widths, riser and tread dimensions, landing depths and headroom clearances get drawn correctly rather than approximated. Toilet and kitchen ventilation openings are checked against minimum area requirements per room. Parking bays get drawn with the actual car footprint and the actual turning circle, because a parking plan that works on paper and not in reality is a problem you inherit for the next thirty years.

Structural coordination happens in parallel, since column positions in a reinforced concrete frame have to sit somewhere sensible in the architectural plan, and a column that appears mid-room after sanction is the classic symptom of a set drawn without that coordination.

For clients who want to see it before it is fixed, we produce 3D visualisation at this stage rather than after, because a walkthrough that changes your mind is useful before submission and merely painful afterwards. Our residential architecture work runs this way as standard, and you can see how it resolves on a completed project like our G+4 residence in Action Area II.

Documents, submission, and what happens when queries come back

The drawings are only half the package. The other half is documentation, and incomplete documentation delays more files than bad design does. Ownership papers, mutation and assessment records, tax receipts, the plot's land use confirmation, structural stability certification, the owner's identity and address documents, and the applicable fee payments all have to line up with each other, so a name spelled one way on the deed and another way on the tax receipt becomes a query.

We keep a running collation checklist for exactly this, and we have written up the usual list in our guide on documents required for an NKDA building sanction, which is worth reading even if you have already appointed someone, simply so you know what to be gathering in parallel.

Once submitted, queries are normal and not a sign of failure. A reviewer may want a clarification on a dimension, an updated area statement, or a corrected annexure, and the difference between a two-week turnaround and a three-month one is usually just whether the studio responds precisely and immediately or drips information back in instalments. Our position on this is simple, which is that a query is our problem to close and not the client's problem to chase, and clients who have gone through the process the other way understand exactly what that is worth.

If you want the wider view of how the process sequences, our guide to the NKDA building plan sanction process in New Town lays it out step by step, and the companion piece on why building plans get rejected is basically the failure modes of everything described above.

What this means when you are choosing who to hire

A sanction set is the clearest test of whether a practice knows your locality, because the drawings that clear smoothly in New Town, Salt Lake and the KMC wards are not identical, and familiarity with one does not transfer automatically to the others. Our own view, formed over more than a decade of doing this from a New Town studio, is that the value a client gets is mostly invisible: the setback that was checked twice, the discrepancy caught at survey stage, the parking bay that fits a real car, the query closed in two days instead of two weeks.

If you are still comparing options, it is worth reading what architects actually handle in NKDA plan approval and how architect fees in Kolkata are typically structured, so you can compare quotes on scope rather than on headline numbers, because the cheapest fee attached to the thinnest drawing set is rarely the cheapest project.

At the end of the day, a good sanction set is a quiet thing, and you only notice it by the absence of problems: no redesign, no re-submission, no column in the middle of the living room, no discovering at completion stage that something upstream was never right. That is the standard our team works to, and if you have a plot in New Town, Salt Lake, Rajarhat or greater Kolkata and want to talk through what your envelope actually allows before you commit to anything, get in touch with our studio and we will start where we always start, which is with your plot and your rules rather than with a plan we already had lying around.