In India, as per the 2011 census, 17.73 lakh people were homeless, which is expected to have gone up in the post-pandemic scenario. Goa contributed more than 3,000 homeless people to the 2011 census.
To mitigate the problem and elevate the social status of the citizens, every government and social service organisation worldwide has been exercising efforts to provide the homeless with shelter. The Government of India’s flagship scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, and the various State level schemes all aim at providing decent housing to citizens.
Goa Housing Board has been a similar effort by the State and in the years of its inception, the government ensured that Goans were able to reap the benefits of affordable housing. The housing board colonies across the State were mostly populated with the most economically backward sections of society. However, the scenario is changing and the houses have either been resold or rented out. In most cases, the original owners don’t live in these plots or houses any more.
Old housing colonies were constructed with single household units, but with family expansion, the original owners have sought to expand the construction or have sold the property and purchased better housing for themselves. The old housing board colonies are turning into concrete slums. Every individual is undertaking haphazard construction to ensure not a single inch of land is left unoccupied and this should be a cause of concern for the government. In case of emergency, there is absolutely no space for an ambulance or a fire brigade engine to navigate these housing board colonies and undertake rescue operations.
The locals of New Vaddem, Vasco, were lucky to escape during a small untoward incident wherein four two-wheelers were gutted in fire in the wee hours. However, if things had turned ugly, the locality would have witnessed a major disaster as the narrow lanes cannot be navigated by even a four-wheeler commercial vehicle.
In its skewed vision to provide housing to every citizen, the government has faltered on many occasions, including the regularization of illegal houses without a thought-out policy, thus encouraging encroachment and illegalities. Ahead of the 2017 Assembly elections, in September 2016, the government’s directions to the panchayats to issue token house numbers, a step towards regularizing the illegal houses, emboldened the encroachers. Recently, 145 houses were under the scanner for being illegally constructed on Davorlim Comunidade land. A senior leader of the BJP and then-candidate from Margao constituency acknowledged that he had encouraged the illegal constructions as they were informed that the houses would be regularized post-Assembly elections of 2022.
The Goa Housing Board has focused on new projects with the idea of multiple-dwelling housing complexes, however, the government should revisit its policy, and wherever single household units were constructed nearly half a century ago or land for the same was sold, should be bought back and multi-housing complexes be constructed. This would help in reversing the concretization of the State and providing affordable housing.
However, transparency in the allotment process is paramount. The Housing Board apartments cannot be treated as investment ideas and purchased at a low price, and then after leaving the board aside the apartment is sold for a much higher price. This defeats the purpose of such a scheme, as the most vulnerable section of the society for whom the scheme is designed is left out.
American sociologist, Matthew Desmond has been quoted on the elevation of poverty as saying, “We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing programme would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative, all rolled into one.”
