PM Khan Kicks off Mega Housing Project in State Capital

ISLAMABAD (12th July, 2019): Prime Minister Imran Khan, laid down the foundation of a mega project to build 18,500 housing units on Thursday.

Addressing the ceremony, the prime minister has said that Out of the 18,500 units to be built in Zone-IV of the federal capital, 10,000 will be for the low-income group, who will be able to buy a house through  banking loans.

The ceremony was reportedly attended by the Minister for Aviation Ghulam Sarwar Khan, Senator Faisal Javed and Member of the National Assembly Asad Umar including those who are hopeful that the project will benefit them.

The Prime Minister said that the government’s role, “will be confined to facilitation” as well as the “provision of land to the private contractors”, who will then “execute the project as the government does not have sufficient resources to fund such a huge project.”

Moreover, PM Khan said that through necessary legislation, the government would be able to ensure controlling the prices of housing units so that a salaried person or any other from the low-income group could afford them easily. The Prime Minister stated that it would take nearly one-and-a-half years for the project to reach its completion.

He said owing to possibly a huge number of applicants, the government would be allotting the units through balloting, to overcome the possibility of overcrowding.

He said the government would soon also launch such beneficial housing projects in other major cities by engaging the private sector as well.

He continued to say that, “In Karachi, around 30 to 40 per cent people live in slums” they neither have ownership rights nor access to amenities like sewerage and others.

Moreover, he stated that for the Sindh metropolis, the government would be offering roughly half of the slums land to the private parties for construction of commercial areas, as well as building reasonable houses for the slum dwellers on the other half.

The Prime Minister further stated that in the federal capital too, the government was planning to build such units for the slum dwellers for which it had identified two sectors. He stressed that experiments of this kind have been carried out in areas such as Mumbai, Turkey and Malaysia and have proved beneficial.

He said in Pakistan, the poor people could not afford their own houses mainly because the banks did not provide them mortgage facility. The government was in the process of promulgating new laws to make the banks extend housing loans to the poor that had so far been available only to the rich class, he added.

With reference to the scheme, PM Khan stated that in Malaysia, housing loans ratio is approximately 10 percent and 80 to 90 percent in the UK and the US, however, in Pakistan the ratio stands at barely 0.2 percent.

The Prime Minister continued to state that the government is struggling to bring in foreign investors for the housing sector. He reiterated his resolve to accomplish the task of five million houses in across Pakistan, so as to bridge the shortage of proper housing and make so the poor people could own their own house(s).

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