Published & Updated as on - 2010-03-07
Ahmedabad:
The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation
(AMC), which had in its 2010-2011 budget set the goal of making Ahmedabad a
slum-free city, has started work to upgrade civic amenities in the slums.
AMC officials said they were in the
process of finalizing the details to upgrade 3000 units in slums across the
city, under the corporation's Slum Networking Project.
The AMC officials had made it clear
while presenting the budget that they intended to provide basic civic amenities
in the city, as part of Swarnim Gujarat celebrations. Under the project, the
AMC has so far developed more than 3,000 households in 44 places in the city.
"In the coming years, we want
to see Ahmedabad free of slums," said a senior AMC official.
"The state government is also
giving the civic body a special grant under the Swarnim Gujarat initiative. So
we have considered faster implementation."
The 2001 census of the city showed
that about 40% of the population lives in slums, which are in the form of
hutments and chawls (semi-slums). The slums are situated in 710 locations and
the chawls in 958 locations; about 1.6 million people live in these slums, in
about 3,26,000 households.
The upgrade of the households under the Slum Network Project
aims to secure 33% share of the total cost from the slum-dwellers and a small
contribution from them towards creating a corpus for the maintenance of these
services.
The slum-dwellers are required to
contribute a fixed amount of Rs2000 per dwelling unit towards Physical Services
and Rs100 towards a corpus for the maintenance of the services in future.
The project also aims to involve
industries and institutions who wish to help the urban poor in improving their
quality of life.
A contribution of Rs2000 per dwelling unit in the slums is
expected from every industry which wants to become a partner in the project.
NGOs are being involved as partners in the project to play an important role in
community development.
They will have to make a contribution of Rs300 per dwelling
unit for the slums they wish to serve. The rest of the cost will be borne by
the AMC.
Source:
DNA 6/3/10
|
