The Attingal municipality, which has often been in the limelight for its innovative projects and achievements in various sectors, is set to have another feather in its cap. On Wednesday, the municipality will hand over land documents to 32 landless Scheduled Caste families. With this, the municipality will have no landless SC family.
According to M. Pradeep, chairman, Attingal municipality, this will make it the first municipality in the country to provide land to all Scheduled Caste families. Over the past four years, the municipality has provided funds to buy land for a total of 400 SC families.
“The municipality gets funds from the Department for Development of Scheduled Castes. We conducted a study on how best to use these funds, along with our own plan funds. Usually, it gets spent on a lot of things, including house maintenance, but we wanted to have something more sustainable. So, we began the process of providing land to the landless SC families four years ago,” says Mr. Pradeep.
Three cents each
A total of ₹4.5 lakh is spent on each family to buy land up to 3 cents. Only those families which don’t stand to inherit property from their families will be considered for the scheme.
The beneficiaries are asked to identify the land they wish to buy.
Once it is identified, officials from the municipality carry out a site visit to ensure that the land is suitable for constructing a house, has proper water supply, access from the main road and is not situated on rocky or marshy terrain. The money is deposited directly in the account of the person selling the land.
Out of the total funds, 30% is from the municipality’s plan fund while the rest is from the Scheduled Castes Development Department.
Houses too
The families who have got land now will also be getting houses there under the State government’s LIFE (Livelihood Inclusion and Financial Empowerment) housing mission.
They have already been included as beneficiaries in the second phase of the project which will happen this year.