NEW DELHI, November 6: The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has come in for a sharp criticism from Union Urban Affairs Minister, Ram Jethmalani, for its failure to provide the Delhiites with proper housing facilities.Speaking to Express Newsline, the minister, who has been calling for a revamp of the 37-year-old organisation, said that the DDA has completely failed in its objective for which it was set up. ``In my view, the DDA outlived its utility long time ago and it should now be either done away with, or drastically scaled down.its performance in the last three decades is nothing short of a national scandal,'' Jethmalani said.The minister said that he was closely monitoring the working of the DDA and has initiated several steps to streamline its operations, which include a move to scrutinise and revamp its panel of lawyers which deals with thousands of litigation cases every year.He pointed out that the DDA was able to develop and construct houses only on a fraction of the land that it had acquired over the years. ``While the capital needs a minimum of one lakh houses annually, the monolithic body has barely managed an average of a mere 5,000 or perhaps even less.most flats in these colonies are of substandard construction.'' he said.``Even today, the DDA, as per its own admission, has as much as 20,000 acres of land in Delhi under its custody which is still to be developed or used for construction activity,'' the minister pointed out. Jethmalani described his recent visit to Dwarka DDA's flagship project on southern fringe of the capital as an eye-opener. ``Thousands of flats were built in Dwarka with no attention to attendant civic ame-nities.many have already crumbled before they were even occupied.''On his last visit to Dwarka, the minister had given the civic agencies a time bound ultimatum to provide basic amenities such as, water, power and roads, so that the flats there could be made habitable.He accused the DDA of feeding on rampant corruption and a deadly nexus between the bureaucracy and the building mafia. Most pending litigation, Jethmalani said, is false and has been dragging on for decades at the cost of hapless consumers. And many lawyers on the DDA's panel have been chosen for reasons other than merit and are in league with the officials to deliberately delay cases, he observed.Jethmalani had broken the 37-year-old monopoly of the DDA to develop land and construct houses in the capital by allowing private builders into the arena, soon after he became a minister. Jethmalani also said that the DDA had no legal basis to abrogate this monopoly and that it was this falsely-acquired right which led to the DDA's failure and a serious housing shortage in the city.
