State to provide pucca houses in place of huts, but cannot define hut .
Ahead of 2012 assembly elections, Congress announced its ‘ghar nu ghar’ scheme. The Bharatiya Janata Party was quick to counter, with its promise of providing 50 lakh houses in next five years, should it be voted to power. And it was.
After the formation of new government, it was announced in the assembly that state government would provide ‘pucca’ houses to all hut dwellers under its ‘zumpdu tyan makan’ (a house in place of hut) plan.
So now, officers working for the state government can see just exactly how difficult their work has become. To begin with, the state government does not have a clear definition of a hut — the rural development department is scratching its head over the definition.
The state government’s rural housing and rural development department has done a massive documentation of 14.77 lakh dwellings in the rural areas of the state. “The documentation will include kutcha houses in all the districts. The work of documentation has almost been completed and now the policy for providing pucca houses to these dwellings is being prepared,” said an official in the state government.
At this point of policy making the government faces a roadblock. If there is no definition of kutcha house, how does one decide which dwelling to consider for the scheme?
“There are considerations over which dwelling should be considered as ‘kutcha makan’, as there is no exact definition for it with the government. Union government schemes like Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) do have guidelines to decide what a kutcha makan is, but these guidelines don’t fit in case of Gujarat,” said sources.
According to IAY guidelines, focus of the scheme is more on identification of beneficiaries in terms of their socio-economic status, caste and other categories like widows and BPL families among others. IAY has provision for upgrading ‘unserviceable kutcha house’ to ‘pucca house’, but is silent on what is ‘kutcha house’.
The working group of planning commission for rural housing has considered the definition of 2001 Census for classification of houses as permanent, semi-permanent, temporary houses, serviceable temporary houses and non-serviceable houses based on the material used to build them. However, Gujarat government is reluctant to use this logic as dwelling units here are constructed using various materials, even a mix.
“In Gujarat we have 14.77 lakh dwelling units identified as kutcha houses. Of these, 13.31 lakh belong to Above Poverty Line (APL). Now, the issue is that IAY doesn’t talk about APL families. Further, it has also been found that there are different types of materials used in these houses. So considerations are going on about the definition of ‘kutcha houses’ and it is likely to be finalised in next few days,” said the official. He also indicated that once the definition is finalised, it is possible that these houses would be converted into pucca houses under the state government’s ‘Sardar Awas Yojana’.
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