140 volunteers are engaged in the survey. (File)
The Delhi housing board has started a first-of-its-kind survey to create an “inventory” of the city’s slum population which, among other things, will help identify those eligible for EWS housing under the Mukhya Mantri Awas Yojana (MMAY), officials said.
The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) has engaged a third-party, whose volunteers, officials said, are uploading documents of surveyed people on a central database.
Currently, in the absence of an official count of slum population, agencies, including DUSIB, operate based on “estimates”.
While the survey was supposed to take place under the Centre’s Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) scheme, it is now being carried out as part of the AAP government’s MMAY.
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The AAP government has decided to keep Delhi out of the ambit of PMAY, under which EWS housing beneficiaries are extended financial assistance.
It has, instead, renamed the ‘Delhi Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy’ as MMAY.
The survey will cover 675 slum clusters in the national capital. So far, around 26,000 individuals have been surveyed, said an official.
According to the official, the primary mandate of the survey is to establish the number of people who are potential beneficiaries of MMAY, which promises rehabilitation of slum dwellers within a 5-km radius of their current place of stay.
Subsequently, an eligibility determination committee will take a final call on beneficiaries based on vetting of documents.
“The survey is app-based… This will create an inventory of all the people, along with families, staying in slums. We must keep in mind that it is not a socio-economic survey where education, health or income indicators will come up,” the official said.
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