Odisha govt to construct over 8 lakh pucca houses in rural areas

Bhubaneswar: To convert kutcha houses of all poor families in rural areas to pucca houses by the year 2022, the Odisha government has set a target to construct over eight lakh houses during the current year.

The government have set an ambitious target for construction of 8,06,329 houses during the current year.

So far, 3, 57, 408 houses are under different stages of completion and the process for the balance cases, including the cases of 57,257 landless families have been expedited, said an official. 

Available data show, so far, construction of 26, 18,497 houses have been completed from the year 2014-15.

This was known from a high level meeting on rural housing held under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy here.

Reviewing the progress made so far, Chief Secretary Tripathy directed to make the approach towards rural housing more people-centric by leveraging the existing norms.

Tripathy directed to provide homestead land to all landless families since they are actually poorest of the poor.

The departments of Revenue & Disaster Management and Forest & Environment and Panchyati Raj & Drinking Water were advised to come up with proposals for amendments, if necessary, for ensuring pucca houses to all poor families.

Presenting the updates, Director Special Projects Rajesh Pravakar Patil said, “There are around 57,257 families in the waiting list for allotment of houses. In the meanwhile, 8,069 families have been allotted homestead land.”

Patil added, “An online system has been developed for mapping and monitoring of revenue village wise landless households. The system captures the details of the landless like their eligibility, nativity, classification of the land which they have encroached, status of house-site distribution etc.”

The data show that many landless families have encroached objectionable land. At some places no leasable land is also available. The issue was deliberated in the meeting.

It was decided that since the landless families listed in the waiting list of rural housing are more needy people, the existing norms and regulations need to be modified for including them in the scheme.