The state government has put up 25,958 houses under beneficiary-led construction and another 6,000 in slum redevelopment categories. The beneficiary-led-construction is a component of the PMAY, which provides assistance to individual eligible families belonging to economically weaker section categories to either construct new houses or enhance existing houses on their own.
Odisha government has set an ambitious target to construct 31,958 affordable houses for the needy in the state by the end of 2018 under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna (PMAY).
Accordingly, it has put the project on fast track and started working on grounding 11,816 such houses by the end of this year at 26 urban local bodies of the state including the state capital. The capital city and parts of Khorda itself will get about 7,762 such houses.
“The houses will be constructed in public-private-partnership mode. We have already selected bidders for three projects in the capital city and surrounding region, which will create a stock of about 7,000 houses. It will be achieved by the end of this year,” said a mandarin of the housing and urban development department.
Besides, to sensitise the beneficiaries to get their houses, the state government has also issued a directive to all the urban local bodies to undertake drives for implementation of the beneficiary-led construction to enable inclusion of more and more number of beneficiaries in the PMAY.
“We have taken the project on priority basis and also decentralized its implementation to achieve the target on time. We have set up Odisha Urban Housing Mission to monitor the project at state level and District Urban Housing Societies to do the same at district level. The reporting is being done on a fortnight basis,” said the official.
So far, the state government has put up 25,958 houses under beneficiary-led construction and another 6,000 in slum redevelopment categories. The beneficiary-led-construction is a component of the PMAY, which provides assistance to individual eligible families belonging to economically weaker section categories to either construct new houses or enhance existing houses on their own.
“The beneficiary-led component is one of the major and important components of PMAY, which can be implemented without much difficulty, but there is a need to sensitize the beneficiaries. In the slum redevelopment, however they will evicted from their places and rehabilitated accordantly,” said another senior functionary.
Besides, the state government has also taken a unique initiative of Rental Housing under which the urban poor mainly the labour class people will get houses on affordable rent price. Accordingly, it has selected ten cities of state including Bhubaneswar, Berhampur, Cuttack and Sambalpur to construct 100 and 50-seated complexes with common shared amenities.
Sources said that the government has already taken up construction of 20 rental housing complexes, which will benefit 1500 migrant labours in ten urban local bodies of the state. The lands for the projects have already been earmarked and the chief minister Naveen Patnaik has laid the foundation stone for the project on May 1. These complexes too will ground by the end of 2018. [July 16-31,2017]
