Loan, Plan Approval etc

I should have added this post before the previous one....
Once you finalize the plan and design of the house, you need to go for a plan approval and construction license.
For the plan to get approved you got to make sure that you plan follows all the offsets and other norms that are specified by the authorities. They vary from area to area I guess.
Any ways in a 30X40 site building a house with the specified offsets is next to impossible, so what do you do? you follow them as much as possible ;-)
What most of the people do is to draw the plan and then shrink it in a way that it meets the specifications, then submit the shrunken plan for approval.
I was very particular about leaving space around the house. So I believe my plan is some what OK.
Another thing that you need to specify in the plan that you need to submit for approval is the details of the Solar heater and rain water harvesting.
There are approved architects who normally do this for you. And yes agents as well.
My contractor helped me to get these contacts. I guess the guy was slightly expensive. I ended up spending around Rs. 65,000/-  for the plan approval.
With the plan approval you also get a license for construction that authorizes you to build a house as per the approved plan. There is a validity period for the license.
You get 5-6 copies of the blue prints of the plan with the details of the license specified. They are for various uses.
The first copy is for the home loan.
The construction license and the approved plan is mandatory for loan, along with other documents like sale deed, Khata, EC etc.
I had shortlisted SBI and LIC HF for the loan. LIC had better offer with 5 year fixed with 9.25% interest rate. Fortunately with the help of my LIC agent I found a very good service executive in LIC HF office. Mr Badrinath. He is an amazingly helpful person with an always willing to help attitude. He helped us in getting the work done very fast. Still it took around 4 weeks.
I had the initial capital to start the work so that delay did not cause any damage in the construction schedule.
The LIC executives visited the site before giving the approval and I made sure that I was available at the site when they came. By the time they came the ground floor concreting was almost ready to go.
Later at various stages of the construction, I had to call the engineer from LIC to do inspection and then release the money. And yeah one most comfortable thing, the cheques from LIC were issued in my name. So that gave a better control on the payments. I guess it is because the loan I took was only for construction.