Odisha Govt Converts 26.18 Lakh Rural Kachha Houses into Puccca Houses in Last Six Years

Bhubaneswar : In another significant development towards converting kacha houses of all poor families in rural area to pucca houses by the year 2022, construction of 26,18,497 houses have been completed during last six years.

This was known from a high level meeting on rural housing held under Chairmanship of Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy in Lokseba Bhawan conference hall today wherein Principal Secretary Panchayati Raj & Drinking Water Deo Ranjan Kumar Singh presented the issues for discussion.

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, the existing norms and regulations need to be modified for including them in the scheme.

Available data show, so far construction of 26,18,497 houses have been completed from the year 2014-15. Government have set an ambitious target for construction of more 8,06,329 houses during the current year. Against this target, 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.