All jhuggi dwellers in Delhi to get pucca houses? Check details here.

Earlier in February, Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs Manohar Lal had also said that he and Union Home Minister Amit Shah had been part of discussions on slum rehabilitation in the Capital over the past three months.

Approximately 50 lakh people, or one-fourth of the city’s population, live in slums, the leaders of both the BJP and the AAP have previously underlined during various events.

There are about 750 slums in Delhi. Of these, around half are set up on land owned by various central government agencies, such as Railways, Land and Development Office (L&DO) and Delhi Development Authority (DDA). The nodal agency for rehabilitation of these slums is DDA.

The other half are located on land owned by the Delhi government, where the nodal agency is the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), which comes under the Urban Development Department.

Slum rehabilitation in the national capital is currently governed by the Delhi government’s Delhi Slum and Jhuggi Jhopri Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy, 2015, which was brought in by the previous AAP government and subsequently also adopted by DDA for slums on central government lands.

The rehabilitation process, however, has progressed at an excruciatingly slow pace over the past decade with only two in-situ projects — in Ashok Vihar and Kalkaji, with a total capacity of around 4,700 flats — having been completed.

The current policy prioritises in-situ rehabilitation — alternate accommodation has to be provided to a slum dweller on the same land or within a radius of 5 km. However, not all slums or slum residents qualify for this support.

Eligibility requires that the slum must have existed before January 1, 2006, and the specific dwelling unit must have been present before January 1, 2015. A slum dweller has to pay a sum ranging between Rs 1.12 lakh to Rs 1.41 lakh to get a house having an area of 25 sq m, as well as Rs 30,000 as maintenance cost for five years.

The Delhi government, through DUSIB and Delhi State Industrial and Infrastructural Development Corporation, since 2008 has constructed 52,584 flats on the city’s outskirts in Dwarka, Sultanpuri, Bhalswa-Jahangirpuri, Savda Ghevra, Pooth Khurd and Tikri Kalan for rehabilitating slum dwellers.

But the allocation of these flats was stuck in a tussle between the AAP-led Delhi government and Centre with Delhi government wanting to allot them to slum dwellers, and the central government wanting to use them as Affordable Housing Rental Complexes under the PM-Awaas Yojana, according to Delhi’s Economic Survey.

With both the governments now led by the same party since last year, it has been decided to allot them to slum dwellers. These flats are now in a dilapidated situation due to years of non-maintenance and thefts.

CM Rekha Gupta had said last year that the government has approved an allocation of Rs 27 crore for the repair of 2,500 flats in Savda Ghevra to make them habitable, which will be allotted this year to slum dwellers.