Providing affordable housing

Election manifestos of political parties have a habit of being overly ambitious. They set out a slew of commitments, grandiose and oversized, only to be forgotten as time passes by. Take, for instance, the ruling PML-N’s 2013 manifesto, which had vowed to provide low-cost housing to those at the bottom of the pile. That pledge in fact represented one of the party’s flagship programmes of constructing 500,000 homes for the low-income segment of society. Under the scheme, the provinces were supposed to provide land free of cost and the federal government was to build housing units around Pakistan in five years. But with more than three years in office, the ruling party is nowhere near delivering on the promise.

A news report taking a hard look at the Apna Ghar Housing Scheme says that so far the meetings, mappings and follow-up huddles have yielded nothing. Essentially, the scheme is limited to files only, say officials. A measure of what priority this crucial project gets in the official scheme of things is the fact that it has not yet been placed before the cabinet for any discussion. All this denotes a worrying state of affairs. It again reflects the tendency of our governments of announcing schemes such as the one broached here with much pomp and show but with little appetite for seeing them through to their completion. The provision of affordable housing is a huge problem in the country that has placed a massive burden on our cities especially, where slum populations have spread and where there are limited availability of public services, giving birth to a host of socioeconomic problems. The PML-N has done little to address this area. The lack of implementation of this scheme also gives credence to the perception that the ruling party is only concerned with projects that have high visibility, like the Metro Bus, and has given little thought to more basic needs of the people. The housing scheme, if implemented as mapped out, could serve to lift electoral fortunes of the party when the 2018 contest is staged. So it is in the PML-N’s own interest to pursue the project to brighten up its poll prospects.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 6^th, 2016.

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