Apart from achieving the 17 sustainable development goals set by the United Nations by 2030, town planners have to focus on housing strategy for the low income group (LIG) and the middle income group (MIG), Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has said.
He was delivering the inaugural address virtually from Amaravati, of the two-day 69th National Town and Country Planning Conference that began here on Friday.
The conference is being organised by the Institute of Town Planners, India.
Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy said housing for the LIG and MIG segments was one of the main programmes of the State. The town planners should deliberated and give ideas on how it could be achieved, he said.
He also said that strategies to counter environmental issues and climate change, and how to tide over problems pertaining to water supply should also be deliberated upon by the experts.
“We are open to suggestions and ideas, and will implement them if they are feasible,” he said.
Integrated coastal development
The Chief Minister also urged the participants and experts to come up with ideas on integrated coastal development plan.
“We have about 974-km of coastline, and Visakhapatnam will stand out to be the biggest beneficiary,” he observed.
Earlier, Principal Secretary (Municipal Administration and Urban Development) Y. Srilakshmi pointed out that urban agglomerations had seen unplanned development and the future lies on planned development.
“De-congesting towns and cities is in focus, but moving people outside the cities and towns by providing all basic amenities and proper and cheap connectivity is a challenge for the urban planners,” she said.
The State government had already focussed on LIG housing, and 17,000 layouts were developed in two months to provide 30 lakh house sites. “And now, it is paying focus on MIG housing,” she said.
Model colonies
“The government is working on developing model housing colonies with the idea of providing 12 plots per acre of 200 square yards each, and every colony will have facilities such as gyms, banks, open theatres, community centres, parks, club houses, wide roads and office spaces,” she said.
Elaborating on office spaces, she said that post COVID-19, the concept of ‘walk to work’ had emerged, and every colony would have a plug-and-play facility. And all these would come at an affordable price, Ms. Srilakshmi added.
She also said that plans were afoot for better waste management by the municipalities and corporations.
‘Clean AP’
“Under the CLAP (Clean AP), a 100-day programme, efforts are on to clean the State by implementing the segregation of dry, wet and hazardous waste at the source points,” she said.
Ms. Srilakshmi also said that in the State there were about 120 sites that contained ‘legacy waste’ such as the Kapuluppada dump, and the total waste lying there was over 1.10 lakh tonnes of different kinds.
Implementing bio-mining process, the waste would be segregated into re-usable and recyclable waste, wet waste and inert waste.
“Re-usable will be sent back to specific industries. Wet waste will be converted into compost, while the inert waste will be used for land filling.
“It is a win-win situation for the civic bodies, the people and the industries,” she observed.
President of ITPI N.K. Patel spoke about various functions of the institute and how the earlier conferences had helped in policy making.
ITPI vice-president V. Ramudu, secretary-general B. Khodankar, and APRC chairman B. Balaji spoke.
