Along with the commitment of building smart cities, government of India also to offer affordable housing below Rs. 5 lakh. In the summit smart city, the officials said the government committed to offer affordable housing units at below Rs. 5 lakh.
According to the statement of Road Transport Highways and Shipping Minister Gadkari, Low cost housing is very important. The biggest impediment is that in our country there are only one per cent people who can buy houses above Rs 10 lakh. If we make available houses at a cost below Rs 5 lakh, 30 per cent people can buy that.
Apart from focus on building smart cities, the primary agenda of Prime Minister is also to providing affordable houses to the poorest of the poor. Under one such venture, an experiment has been done in Nagpur to construct a house on steel structure using 70 per cent fly ash, which will be inaugurated on February 20.
The minister added that the construction cost of the building comes at Rs 1000 per square feet. We will be able to provide 450 square feet house in Rs 5 lakh. We are installing solar system in that besides furniture including bed made of fly ash. A subsidy of Rs 1.5 lakh would be given on it. The cost of the house will be Rs 3.5 lakh and loan will be available for 7 to 7.5 per cent interest rate…even a poor can buy that.
Besides from smart cities, the government of India also committed to develop the existing cities as per the modern day requirement. Ten out of 12 major ports will have smart cities.
Barring Kolkata and Mumbai, smart cities would be developed at our 10 ports. He also urged the investors to come forward to set up smart cities under PPP (public private partnership), with the government ready to offer land, besides clearances in a transparent manner.
According to the source, India has 12 major ports which handle approximately 61 per cent of the country’s total cargo traffic and these ports are – Kandla, Mumbai, JNPT, Mormugao, New Mangalore, Cochin, Chennai, Ennore, V O Chidambaranar, Visakhapatnam, Paradip and Kolkata (including Haldia).