Slum dwellers living by encroaching government land or water bodies in the city will soon get pucca, concrete-roofed flats, a good number of them before the end of May.
As many as 6,000 flats in various housing sites are ready for occupation, say sources from the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) that has constructed the houses. They include around 1,800 tenements in Ukkadam, over 2,800 in Vellalore and a little over 1,200 in Keeranatham.
The Board was giving finishing touches to a few of those tenements and would complete installing street lights and providing sewerage connection. Once it completed those, it would ask the Coimbatore Corporation to allot the houses.
For, it was the Corporation that had identified beneficiaries living in various slums in the city, captured their biometric details and given papers that would make them eligible for the Board’s tenements, the sources add.
Coimbatore Corporation sources say the allotment is the Board’s job as the civic body ended with identifying the beneficiaries, capturing their biometric details and sharing the details with the Board.
The Board sources say that they will sort out the procedural difference soon with the Corporation. But even as they do so, they have identified a few residents who ought to get the tenements on priority - those residents from Valankulam who were left out while in the Ammankulam house allotment process, the residents whom they recently evicted from a railway land near Kadalakara Lane and residents from near Fun Mall whom the Corporation evicted more than five years ago during World Classical Tamil Conference.
Residents encroaching upon Vellalore Canal and those along a few stretches of Sanganoor Canal will also get the houses.
As for others living along water bodies and on other government lands, the Board it was constructing 4,000 more flats and they would be ready by the year-end; the flats are coming up in Madukkarai, Malai Nagar, near Kovaipudur and Malumichampatty.
In all, the Board is constructing 10,888 houses. And, this will take care of the housing needs of almost all the city’s slum dwellers.
