DUSIB survey to identify slum residents eligible for EWS flats
The cut-off date for eligibility under the scheme is January 1, 2015, which means that those who have been staying in the slums at least since January 1, 2015 can apply for the programme.
Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), the slum management agency of the Delhi government, has launched a survey to identify slum dwellers who are eligible for allotment of flats meant for the economically weaker sections (EWS) category under the “Mukhya Mantri Awas Yojna”, the agency’s chief executive officer Kumar Mahesh said on Thursday.
Mahesh said that the government aims to allot more than 9,000 EWS flats built for the slum dwellers in the first phase.
“A group of 50 graduate and post-graduate students from Delhi University have been roped in for the survey. They have been divided into different teams and each team has an engineer from DUSIB. The survey teams will collect information from the slum dwellers about their period of stay in the JJ cluster, their family details, annual income and source of income, etc. The information is crucial to the process to allotment of flats to the eligible slum dwellers,” said Mahesh. The survey started on Wednesday.
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The cut-off date for eligibility under Delhi government’s Rehabilitation policy is January 1, 2015 which means that those staying in the slums before January 1, 2015 are eligible for the allotment of flats provided that they meet other criteria like they should have voters’ identity card of 2012, 2013 , 2014 , 2015 and other documents like Aadhar card , ration card etc., to establish their stay in the slum.
Once the survey is over, DUSIB will form an eligibility determination committee which will study the outcome of the survey and take a call on the eligibility of the slum dwellers. “Those rejected by the committee will have a forum for right to appeal following the principles of natural justice,” said Mahesh.
There are close to 30,000 flats which have been constructed in Delhi under the UPA-era schemes Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) in the past few years. The JNNURM flats are built with contribution of 50% each by the central and the state government.
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But a majority of these flats are lying vacant. While the Delhi government initiated the allotment process to 9,000-plus slum residents, it was put on hold after the Centre launched the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHCs) scheme was announced in 2020. Under the ARHCs scheme, the flats (for which even the Centre has paid) have to be allotted to urban poor on rent.
But the Delhi government opposed the scheme, saying it will not be successful in the national capital. The government said that these flats should be allotted on a freehold basis, especially in areas where the slum clusters are within a five-km radius of the housing complex.
