In a bid to make the city slum free, the Municipal Corporation of Dehradun (MCD), the implementing agency of the Rajiv Awas Yojana project of the Centre, has initiated the preparatory measures for the project and also earmarked the slum areas to be regularised. However, the corporation has yet to make a slum-free city plan which has to be approved by the Government of India for the work on this project to be started.
The main objective of the project is to make the city slum free, regularise the slums, improve housing, basic civic infrastructure and social amenities in intervened slums, enabling reforms to address some of the causes leading to creation of slums, facilitating a supportive environment for expanding institutional credit linkages for the urban poor, institutionalising mechanisms for prevention of slums including creation of affordable housing stock, strengthening institutional and human resource capacities at the Municipal, City and State levels through comprehensive capacity building and strengthening of resource networks.
This project is an overall action plan with investment requirements projected and prioritised for upgrading the existing slums and planning for houses for the urban poor for the next 10-15 years.
As per a project officer at MCD, all the related preparatory
measures, including survey of the slum areas and Management and Information System (MIS) have been completed.
He informed that the survey work has already been completed and now the work of de-notification of the slum areas is scheduled to be done.
As per the policy, the slums areas would be categorised into two sections. The slums not featuring in any land dispute would be kept in first category and the second category would include the slums which have pending land related issues. The regularisation of the category one slums would be done on priority basis and after this the focus would be on the regularsation of second category slums.
The MCD is mainly responsible for a slum-free city action plan which would be forwarded to the Government of India and then after approval the plan would be implemented in the town. An official of MCD on condition of anonymity revealed that MCD has not yet prepared any such action plan for the project. Further work related to the project can only proceed after the MCD's slum free city plan is prepared and approved by the Government of India.