Tripura offers land, housing to poor families

Agartala, July 5 (IANS) Ahead of the assembly polls, scheduled for February next year, the Left Front government in Tripura has decided to provide land with housing facilities to people living below the poverty line (BPL), a minister said here Thursday.

"The Left Front government would provide 0.4 acre of land to rural and 0.2 acre to urban BPL families and construct houses at government cost," Tripura Finance Minister Badal Choudhury told reporters.

He said the state government has decided to rehabilitate landless poor families of the northeastern state.

According to the Tripura government's assessment, 67 percent of the state's 3.7 million people are BPL, while the central government estimates the figure to be 40.6 percent.

The Tripura government, however, has disagreed with the central government's criteria to determine the BPL percentage.

For construction of fencing along the India-Bangladesh international border, thousands of families in Tripura were affected as their farmlands, ponds and other properties had fallen outside the barbed wire fencing.

"Paddy fields, lands and various farms of thousands of farmers had fallen outside the fence, putting them in an awkward position. The state government had long back sent a Rs.93 crore project to the centre to rehabilitate the affected families but it has yet to respond," the minister said.

Choudhury said that of the 7,774 affected families whose houses have fallen outside the fencing, 4,651 families were so far sanctioned houses under the Indira Awas Yojana (IAY).

According to a senior state government official, over 8,750 families comprising over 50,000 people in the state have been affected by the ongoing construction of the barbed wire fencing.

India is erecting the fence all along the 4,095-km India-Bangladesh border in West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and Mizoram to check trans-border movement of militants, and to prevent infiltration and border crimes.