Coimbatore Corporation and Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) on Wednesday demolished 1,025 houses on the northern bank of Valangulam tank, to free the water body of encroachments.
The two government agencies had sometime ago allotted the Valangulam residents 790 TNSCB tenements in Ammankulam and followed it up with issuing notices for demolition.
It also asked the remaining beneficiaries among the residents – those who did not get the Ammankulam tenements – to vacate their houses and wait for three months to be allotted houses in the Ukkadam housing project.
With men and machinery, the Corporation and TNSCB went about demolishing the houses and also those that had been abandoned. A few residents complained to the TNSCB officials that though they were genuine residents of the slum they had been left out in the enumeration exercise.
They wanted the authorities to provide them houses.
K. Vinitha, a resident, said that she was born and bred in the Valangulam slum but she had been left out of the beneficiaries’ list. Her certificates would prove that she had indeed lived there.
Another resident M. Jayalakshmi claimed that though the TNSCB authorities had noted down her name thrice, she had been left out of the beneficiaries list.
The women along with many others argued with the officials that they too be allotted houses and until such time the government agencies stop demolishing their houses.
False claims
The TNSCB officials said that almost all claims of being left out of the beneficiaries list were false because the claimants were not there at the time of enumeration and had entered Valangulam thereafter, or had lived there and migrated to other places in the city, or their kith or kin would have been a beneficiary and they were hiding the facts.
They clarified that the Board could allot houses to only a person to each of the beneficiary families and not all members.
The Corporation officials said that they would soon push the debris to construct a bund, protect the water body and improve it with funds from the Central Government.