Chandigarh Punjab chief secretary Vini Mahajan on Saturday approved the grant of proprietary rights to 1,996 slum households in six districts under chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh’s flagship slum development programme, ‘Basera’. The approval was given at the third meeting of the steering committee for the Basera scheme that the chief secretary chairs. With this, Punjab has become the first state in the country to implement a scheme for granting proprietary rights to the slum dwellers occupying state government land in urban slums.
The 1,996 households, who have been given the proprietary rights, are settled at 24 slum sites in Patiala, Ludhiana, Mansa, Ferozepur, Barnala and Kapurthala districts.
Reviewing the progress of the Basera scheme, the chief secretary directed the local government department to complete household surveys, so that the process to grant proprietary rights to 11,000 more slum dwellers is completed at the earliest.