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Offered PM Awas Yojana houses to people living outside fence, says Saha
Manik Saha told the assembly that 31 of the 75 families that stay outside the barbed wire fencing in Matinagar were given PMAY houses in 2018 but they declined to shift
AGARTALA: Tripura chief minister Manik Saha on Tuesday said families which live beyond the India-Bangladesh border fence in the state’s Matinagar area were offered houses under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana but they declined the offer and opted to stay in their existing houses.
Saha told the assembly that of 75 families that stay outside the barbed wire fencing at Matinagar area, 31 families were given PMAY houses in 2018 inside the fencing area, but they refused to shift.
“Among these 31 houses, 25 ones were built on Indian soil inside the fence on Indian soil. But they are still staying outside the fence. These 31 families even applied for electricity connections, but the remaining 44 families use hook-lines to get access to power”, said Saha.
He added that only 17 families pay their power bills.
“As I talked to the DM, he told me that these people are illegally consuming power without paying bills. That’s why the DM disconnected their power connections”, the chief minister said.
He added that cross-border crimes including human trafficking and smuggling of drugs were reported from the stretch and many of these families had relatives on both sides of the border.
The chief minister’s statement came after leader of opposition Jitendra Chaudhury asked Saha to rehabilitate the families who lived outside the border fence.
The Congress has submitted a memorandum to the Tripura Human Rights Commission seeking its intervention to improve the living condition of these families.
