Urban News

The Hindu 06.11.2009

New houses for over 8,000 families in slums: Minister

Staff Reporter

Tirupur: The Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board will construct new dwellings for 8,226 families residing in 36 slums in Tirupur city to provide them with better basic amenities and hygienic environment, according to Minister for Slum Clearance and Accommodation Control Suba Thangavelan.

Phased manner

“The construction will be carried out in a phased manner with 1,500 houses for as many numbers of families coming up in the first stage,” he told reporters here on Thursday.

He said that the Board was in the process of obtaining about 17 acres for the construction of 1,500 houses identified for the preliminary phase. The next set of houses, according to him, will be constructed once the city was brought under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission next fiscal.

Each of the houses would have living space ranging from 270 sq. ft. to 330 sq. ft.

Amenities

Mr. Thangavelan said that housing units would be established in four-storied blocks and provided an access to basic amenities like drinking water, street light, storm water drains and sewer lines.

He said that similar slum development programmes had been taken up for cities like Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai. “In Chennai, we have already completed the construction of 10,000 dwellings out of the 1,11,111 housing units planned for the rehabilitation of slum dwellers before 2013,” he said.

Free cycles

Earlier, Mr. Thangavelan along with Minister for Highways and Minor Ports M.P. Saminathan distributed free cycles to 3,700 students at Nanjappa Corporation Boys HSS here. Collector C. Samayamoorthy was present.

The Hindu 04.11.2009

Biometric survey of slum-dwellers begins

Special Correspondent

Photo: S. Siva Saravanan

NEW INITIATIVE: A woman gets her thumb impression recorded during a biometric survey in the city on Tuesday. —

COIMBATORE: Under a scheme to provide houses to slum-dwellers, a bio-metric survey of about 2,000 families living in the slums that encroached upon Valankulam Tank began in Ward 25 in the city on Tuesday. The impression of the left thumb of the beneficiaries were being scanned and stored in a database along with the family and income details.

This exercise was part of the Basic Services for the Urban Poor scheme that was being implemented by the Coimbatore Corporation under the Central Government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. The objective of the scheme was to create slum-less cities.

Coimbatore was among 63 cities in the country to be covered under the scheme for providing houses with all civic amenities to people living in hutments.

South Zone Chairman P. Pynthamil, who launched the survey, said houses in multi-storeyed tenements would be allotted to each eligible family. Families of persons in government service, including conservancy workers, were not eligible, Mr. Pynthamil said. The targeted beneficiaries worked as domestic help or were daily wage earners. Each family would get a house of 270 sq.ft., costing Rs.1.6 lakh, he said. The Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board would construct the tenements at Ammankulam and Ukkadam for 3,840 families out of the total 9,840 living in slums on water bodies.

The provision of houses for the rest 6,000 families would require acquisition of lands.

The survey would serve as a fool-proof record during allocation of houses. It would show all the details such as ration card number, names of the family members, their photographs and annual income.

The database would show if a beneficiary had already been allotted a house. If any beneficiary wanted to apply for one more house by using a bogus family card, the data available would expose this. “Once the houses are ready, these families on Valankulam will vacate the tank area,” Mr. Pynthamil, who represented Ward 25, said.