Curation Team
NEW DELHI: With govt exploring various options to provide housing to the city’s slum dwellers, Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) has decided to conduct a survey of land under its jurisdiction and identify encroachments over them.
In a meeting held a few days ago, the chief executive officer of DUSIB also directed officials to map jhuggi jhopri clusters that have come up on the agency’s land and the area encroached upon by each cluster along with the number of families living there. Officials said the CEO directed DUSIB engineers to submit the report at the earliest.
An official said the current dispensation issued strict directives to all stakeholder departments to ensure that the slum dwellers meeting the eligibility criteria are provided with pucca housing under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. Of the 675 recorded slum clusters, 378 have come up on land belonging to DDA, railways and other central govt agencies, while the rest are on land under DUSIB, MCD and others.
As per estimates, Delhi’s 20% population, or nearly 50 lakh people, live in more than 675 slums, spread over nearly 7.5km—0.5% of 1,483 square kilometres of the city’s total area. Delhi Development Authority has already initiated an exercise to conduct a detailed survey of central land encroached upon by slums.
Officials said the district-wise mapping of JJ clusters will include key details such as the existing land use, number of households and the total area of each cluster. The survey of all vacant lands under DUSIB’s jurisdiction will include details such as the size of land parcels, whether it is encroached, availability and condition of boundary walls, current land use status and use of the land as per the approved layout plan. “This comprehensive assessment will help in identifying viable land parcels for future housing development initiatives and monetisation,” said an official.
To provide the slum dwellers with pucca houses, the govt came up with Delhi Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy, 2015, stressing in situ rehabilitation.
