Municipal Corporation fails to rehabilitate slum dwellers

Sumit Hakhoo

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Tribune News Service

Jammu, February 11

While successive governments in the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir state deliberately stalled implementation of Centrally sponsored schemes to rehabilitate slum dwellers, post abrogation of Article 370, the civic bodies continue to adopt the same policy.

While private land owners are minting money by encouraging shanties, housing thousands of people, especially migrant labourers in inhuman conditions, the Jammu Municipal Corporation (JMC) and J&K (UT) Housing Board has failed to come up with any plan to improve the living condition of disadvantaged people or provide affordable housing units under various Central schemes.

Recently, the Public Health Sanitation Committee of the JMC has directed land owners to provide water connections, construct toilets in the shanties which many social activists say would encourage more people to use their land for erecting slums for monitory consideration.

“A majority of the people living in the makeshift slum colonies are labourers. The government should take steps to consider them for affordable housing units under various Central schemes”, said RS Jamwal, a social activist.

Jamwal further said, “With the abrogation of Article 370, a major roadblock for the rehabilitation of non-state residents living in Jammu and Kashmir for decades has been removed”.

As per the survey conducted a few years ago about 1-lakh people were living in the shanties in both Jammu and Srinagar — the two capital cities of J&K UT. However, the benefit of two schemes — Basic Services to Urban Poor (BSUP) and the Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP) — could not be extended to the erstwhile state due to political reasons in the past.

In the erstwhile state, the governments discouraged extending the scheme benefits to the non-state subjects forcing many people living in J&K for decades to live in insanitary conditions without even basic amenities of life.

However, the JMC Sanitation Committee chairman, Baldev Singh Billawaria, said that the corporation was making plans to rehabilitate those living in slums. “We are working on a plan as after the abrogation of Article 370, the path is now clear for the implementation of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act”, Billawaria said.

He said the people living in slums could not be evicted unless any plan was announced and till then, the MC was encouraging private land owners to improve living conditions.