With just two more days to go, the mega housing scheme of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has surprisingly witnessed very few takers this year. After over a month of being open, the scheme, so far, has received only around 1.75 lakh registrations — a figure not even remotely close to the response during the DDA’s 2010 Housing Scheme. Officials claim that the tepid response might be due lack of two and three bedroom flats on offer.
It may be the biggest housing scheme the land development agency has ever offered, yet it can be called as one which has received the poorest response ever. With 25,034 flats on offer this year, the scheme has witnessed 1.75 lakh registrations from all over the country till Monday. It is pertinent to note that the last date for applying for the scheme is Thursday. In the 2010 housing scheme of DDA, about 16,000 flats were on offer and the number of applications that came was 7.4 lakh.
For the latest scheme, while the number of flats is much more, the number of applications received till the last working day (Friday) was just 92,000. During the weekend along with Monday which was also a Holiday due to Eid-ul-Azha, the housing agency received around 27,000 registrations on an average. Unless there is an unprecedented rush for filing forms in the last three working days beginning Tuesday, it seems unlikely the response this time would be anywhere near the 2010 scheme figures.
“People have bought around 17 lakh-18 lakh forms of the 2014 Housing Scheme through our office counters and bank branches and we expect a large number of these to be filled and submitted. But the response till now has been very poor, we hope the numbers would pick up Tuesday onwards,” said a senior DDA official.
Discerning the reasons, DDA officials said that a major reason could be the lesser number of three bedroom and even two bedroom flats in the scheme being offered. Though the total number of flats is the biggest offered by DDA ever, the lion’s share of it — 22,627 — consists of one bedroom flats. Number of three bedroom flats is just 21 and that of two bedroom flats is 561. Officials say this is perhaps the reason why the middle class flat aspirant is not showing much interest in the housing scheme.
Another significant reason, according to DDA officials, is the clause of a five year lock-in period introduced for the first time. According to the clause, the flats wouldn’t be registered in the name of the allottee till five years from the date of possession. The idea is to keep speculators at bay and encourage only those who want to live in their allotted flats. “Even though the number of registrations are less, it only means that we have been successful in keeping investors and speculators away from the getting a house. Our aim was to allot houses to the needy,” said the official.