Plan: Corporation to focus on housing for poor

The City Corporation will focus on housing for the poor and development of infrastructural facilities in the Plan activities it is all set to take up for the 12th Five Year Plan period of 2012-17.

The development seminar organised by the City Corporation to plan the 12th Five Year Plan for 2012-13 and 2013-14 and the perspective plan for 2012-17 has envisaged projects worth Rs 850 crore for the five-year plan period.

The Corporation has set aside Rs 122.13 crore for the plan period 2012-13. According to the new plan guidelines, a 15-per cent increase is allowed in the second year, which is to be estimated during the preparation of the two-year rolling plan. The development seminar compiled suggestions for the vision document for 2012-17, annual plan 2012-13 and two-year rolling plan 2012-14.

The members of the 19 working groups discussed the Draft Development Plan-2012 and Draft Perspective Plan 2012-17 at the development seminar organised at Cotton Hill GHSS on Saturday which was earlier inaugurated by Speaker G Karthikeyan.

The networking of zonal offices, setting up of touch-screens, making the Corporation a paperless office, survey on computer literacy and GIS mapping include the proposals that  came up in the IT and e-governance sector. There were no innovative proposals in agriculture and the ones that came up in paddy cultivation, plantain cultivation and terrace farming were those already existing. The plan is to encourage organic farming and vegetable farming in the city limits in the next five years.

It is in the housing scheme that a major suggestion came up. That the Corporation should buy land using government subsidy and then use it for housing schemes in the Corporation limit which could solve a lot of problems. A discussion in this respect came up at the seminar along with the suggestion that the money allotted for housing or buying land should be increased. 

Inaugurating the seminar, the Speaker said that the local body should try to come up with the plan proposals in a time-bound manner. The working group meeting will again be held next week and the development plan will then be forwarded to the Council. This time, with the doing away of the TAG, only the proposal need to be submitted to the DPC and not the entire project.