Another 5.87 lakh homeless to get housing by 2024

After rehabilitating nearly two lakh homeless, the government is now going to provide accommodation for another about 5.87 lakh landless and homeless families under the project Ashrayan-2.

Some 5,87,417 new landless, homeless and unprivileged individuals have been identified to give them a domicile address.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has sent a revised proposal titled Ashrayan-2 (4th Revision) to the Planning Commission for the approval of the Executive Committee of National Economic Council, a senior official of the ministry told The Business Post.

The PMO has sought Tk 7,539 crore to implement the project by June 2024.

Under the project, the government will build 14,720 new barracks for providing shelter to the landless and homeless families.

Of them, 5,149 will be brick houses, and 5,006 semi-brick to be constructed in char areas and 4,393 semi-brick structures in other parts of the country.

Asked about it, Planning Minister MA Mannan said Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has taken the initiative to give shelter to the landless.

According to Planning Commission member Ramendra Nath Biswas, “We have held an evaluation committee meeting and cleared the project that has been sent to ECNEC for approval.”

The main components of the project are construction of 1,110 community centres, internal roads in all vicinities under the project, 580 specially designed houses, installation of shallow-deep tube wells and building 564 ghats, internal roads, box culverts, paved drains and slope protection.

The PMO first undertook the massive project Ashrayan-2 in 2010 to rehabilitate 2.50 lakh people across the country. The first two phases under the project were successfully completed in that year.

The first Ashrayan project was launched in 1997 and a total of 2,97,886 families were provided with shelter in three phases.

Under the Tk 4,826-crore scheme of Ashrayan-2, the government has already rehabilitated a total of 1,91,953 families from July 2010 to date.

Ashrayan is one of the 10 priority projects of the prime minister. It was designed to provide the distressed population with home and other support to be self-reliant.

The main objective of the project is to make the homeless and the landless capable of running their own income-generating initiatives having interest-free loan and training on various trades to make them economically independent.

The activities of the project will be accelerated in future to alleviate poverty for achieving the Vision-2021 of the present government and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

Apart from poverty alleviation, the project will focus on improving living conditions, education and health of the project beneficiaries.