Hyderabad: Revenue and housing minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy on Tuesday announced that the state government would formally launch Phase-II of the Indiramma housing scheme in Adilabad district on June 2, Telangana Formation Day. He said the Cabinet would finalise the modalities during its meeting scheduled for May 21, following the near-completion of works taken up under the first phase.
The minister made the announcement while chairing a meeting to review the work of revenue and housing departments with public representatives and officials of the erstwhile Rangareddy and Hyderabad districts. The meeting was attended by Assembly Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar, ministers D. Sridhar Babu, Ponnam Prabhakar, Mohammed Azharuddin, Legislative Council Chief Whip P. Mahender Reddy, MPs, MLAs, MLCs, district collectors, commissioners of the Cyberabad and Malkajgiri municipal corporations, and officials from the housing, revenue and forest departments.
Srinivas Reddy said the previous BRS government’s lack of foresight in constructing double-bedroom houses far away from Hyderabad city had caused severe hardship to the beneficiaries. He said the government was determined not to repeat the same mistake and directed officials to identify land within a radius of five to eight kilometres from the localities where the urban poor were presently residing for the construction of Indiramma houses in the core urban region (CURE), the area bound by the Outer Ring Road.
The minister said that field-level assessments had shown that beneficiaries allotted double-bedroom houses located 20 to 30 km away from the city were unwilling to shift there because it affected their livelihoods. Keeping this issue in view, he instructed officials to involve public representatives in preparing proposals for Indiramma housing projects so that beneficiaries could continue to live close to their workplaces and social networks.
Taking each Assembly constituency as a unit, officials were instructed to prepare proposals by identifying government land, slum areas, Bhoodan land and dilapidated housing colonies constructed under earlier schemes.
Srinivas Reddy also directed officials to undertake a special drive to identify beneficiaries for completed and partially completed 2BHK housing units by the end of May. He made it clear that preference should be given only to eligible persons living within five to eight kilometres of those housing colonies. He directed officials to ensure continuous monitoring so that completed houses were occupied without delay and asked them to expedite provision of basic amenities such as drinking water, drainage and electricity in these colonies.
The minister directed officials to distribute Indiramma housing sanction letters by the end of this month to all eligible beneficiaries in Hyderabad who possessed house sites.
Issuing a stern warning against encroachment on government lands, Srinivas Reddy said the government would not tolerate even an inch of public land being occupied illegally.
He said the government was prepared to construct permanent buildings for revenue and mandal division offices and sub-registrar offices that were functioning without their own infrastructure and asked officials to prepare proposals accordingly. He directed the revenue and forest departments to work in coordination to resolve boundary disputes between the two departments.