Govt lens on flats allotted to poor

In order to further decide on the housing crisis in the national capital, the urban development and housing and urban poverty ministry has written to the Delhi government for numbers of the flats allotted to the poor under the UPA government’s ambitious flagship scheme Jawaharlal National Urban Renewal Mission.

The ministry has asked the Delhi government to furnish the number of flats allotted to people belonging to the economically weaker sections of society.

The ministry sources told this newspaper that the step has been taken to access the success of the scheme in the capital. “We have to see the numbers of the houses constructed an allotted in order to understand the situation better, since the ministry will be looking at tweaking the project, we need to get the numbers,” said a senior official on the condition of anonymity. The UPA government was to build 67,784 flats under the Basic Service to the Urban Poor — a sub- mission of the JNNURM. A Delhi government official said of these, only 4,000 have been allotted and data is being collated to send a formal reply to the ministry.

“Delhi had topped the list of under users vis- à- vis the JNNURM project, therefore it becomes important to find out whether the housing scheme worked for the EWS or not,” a ministry source said.

The deadline for all the projects under the UPA’s JNNURM ended in March, after which the funds for completing the projects further for discontinued by the government at the Centre. As reported by this newspaper earlier, less than 50 per cent of the projects under the JNNURM were completed in more than nine years of its launch.

The Delhi government has been busy in calculating the exact data of the houses under the project to reply to the ministry.

The Delhi government official added that the identification of these houses is a difficult task: “The problem is of identification. Many people have been identified, but they don’t have documents like ration cards required for allotment of a flat.”