Two years after completion, 63 flats built for urban poor lying vacant in D'sala
Sixty three flats developed for urban poor under the Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP) of the Government of India in Dharamsala are lying vacant.
Sources said out of the 168 flats developed here, 63 were to be allotted to the eligible homeless urban poor. The flats were lying vacant even two years after their completion.
Commissioner of the Dharamsala Municipal Corporation (MC) Zaffar Iqbal said 103 out of the168 flats constructed for urban poor under the IHSDP had been allotted and the process of the allotment of the remaining flats was on. He said applications had been sought from eligible people for the allotment of the remaining flats. We can allot flats to only those people who are eligible under the scheme, he said.
Meanwhile, the sources told The Tribune that the flats allotted to poor people had started developing defects. Those allotted houses had started complaining that within a year of the possession, the single-room flats allotted to them had become unliveable. They were complaining to the MC that water was leaking from roofs in many flats and poor fitments in the flats were showing up at many places.
The MC had taken up the matter of the poor construction of the flats with the company that had built these. The completion certificate to be issued to the company had also been withheld due to complaints by occupants of flats.
The sources said that most of 103 flats have been allotted to rag pickers of Dharamsala. These rag pickers were earlier residing in slum near the Charan river in Dharamsala. However, in 2017 these slum dwellers were evicted by Dharamsala MC as the area on which their slums were located was selected for construction of the head office of corporation under the Smart City project.
The project for building flats for poor in Dharamsala was sanctioned during the stint of the BJP government, led by Prem Kumar Dhumal. The work for the construction of houses was started during the stint of last Congress government from 2012-17. The execution of the project took about 10 years.
The initial budget for the project was Rs 10 crore that was provided by the Union Ministry of Urban Development during the rule of the UPA-II government. However, the Dharamsala municipal corporation in the year 2017 demanded additional Rs 10 crore for the completion of the project.
The sources said the cost of the construction of the single-room houses for urban poor went up to over Rs 15 crore. If the cost of the bridge that was constructed to give road connectivity to flats was included, the total cost of the project comes to above Rs 20 crore. The unit cost of single room houses being allotted to poor went go up to Rs 20 lakh.
The urban poor in Dharamsala also had to pay about Rs 1.5 lakh for getting the single-room apartment built here under the IHSDP.
Under the criteria, only urban poor who do not have their own houses and have an annual income of less than Rs 35,000 had been selected for the allotment of houses built under the programme.