Cheque To Slum-dwellers
Mayor R. Venkatachalam (second left) and Corporation Commissioner V.K. Shanmugham (left) handing over cheques to slum-dwellers for construction of houses under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission at K.K. Pudur in Coimbatore on Monday. The Coimbatore Corporation released on Monday Rs. 28,000 each for 29 families towards the construction of houses for them. This was the third instalment given to these beneficiaries of the Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP) programme under the Central Government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. The beneficiaries were from Mayor R. Venkatachalam’s ward (no.63) at K.K. Pudur. The Mayor said 55 families had submitted applications. Of these, 49 were selected after it was found that they had all the required documents. And, 47 of them had been provided with the first instalment of grants from the Central and State Governments. The cost of each house, measuring less than 200 sq.ft., was Rs. 1.12 lakh. Of this, the beneficiaries had to contribute Rs. 48,000. The rest of the amount, in the form of grants, was being released at various stages of construction. “The construction is on at a good pace,” the Mayor said. Quite a number of beneficiaries had got the third instalment of funds.
According to the Corporation, the Rs. 373-crore BSUP scheme aimed at providing houses to more than a lakh people living in the slums in the city. The slums would be covered in three phases. In the first phase, 5,186 houses would be built at Rs. 58.51 crore for 23,337 people. In the second phase, 10,947 houses would be built at Rs. 199 crore for 46,279 people. Under the third phase of the scheme, the Corporation planned to re-locate 91 slums on water bodies and road margins. For this, the Corporation planned to use its lands to constructed tenements for these slum-dwellers or acquire land for the purpose.
When pointed out that slum-dwellers could not afford loans at high interest rates to pay their share of the project cost, the Mayor said the Corporation had enabled the beneficiaries to get loans at low interest rates. He said a nationalised bank offered loan at 4 per cent interest, treating this as a special case. The Mayor said that in Ward 62, 90 of the 110 applicants had been chosen under the project. While work orders to build houses had been issued to 42 of them, the first instalment of government funds had been released to 16 families.
