Efforts on to make Coimbatore slum free by 2015

By 2015 when the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board will complete the dozen-odd projects at hand, the city will be slum free. Or, that is what is being promised by the Board officials.

The first step towards the slum-free status will be taken in the next few days, when the Board in association with the Coimbatore Corporation and district administration will hand over 792 houses in Ammankulam to those occupying the Valangulam bund illegally.

The Board has completed the project and is ready to throw it open to the beneficiaries but only after an allocation involving draw of lots in the public.

The allotment of houses will also end the long wait of the city’s slum dwellers and the uncertain period that saw the Board demolishing a block and removing a few houses to stabilise the structures following their sinking.

As for the Ukkadam project, the Board said that by March 2015, it would be able to handover the 20 blocks to the beneficiaries as the 1,840 houses were nearing completion.

Here again, the Board had to pull down a block and stop with ‘ground plus three floors’ to restore stability.

The officials said that nine months thereafter they would be ready to handover more than 13,000 houses to as many beneficiaries, who would move from the objectionable Government land to the tenements.

Besides, the Board is also actively involved in helping people in ‘kutcha’ houses – tiled-roofed and thatched roofed – convert the same into ‘pucca’ houses by providing assistance to the tune of 90 per cent of the cost.

Fifty per cent will be the Central Government’s contribution and 40 the State Government’s. The beneficiary will have to bear 10 per cent of the cost.