Palin Mandira: Every family to get a house of its own

THE new trends of the millennium has encouraged people worldwide to migrate to the urban areas. It is estimated that, since about the year 2000, half of the world population is living in main cities.

In Sri Lanka too, during the past several years this situation has become more serious, with a migration of a large number of people to our Capital city due to several social purposes. This has become a challenge for the development efforts of the country.

According to the national policy of the Government, it has emphasised priority to housing development.

The President in his “Mahinda Chinthana” concept and its 10-year vision has clearly expressed that “Every family in Sri Lanka, should have a house of its own” and one of the eight objectives among the Millennium Goals that the 192 member states have agreed is to try to achieve this by the year 2015 and improve the lives of at least 192 million slum dwellers by 2020.

Cities have to be liveable, and this has several dimensions; a decent home for every citizen, a high quality built environment rich in urban design, with good quality services, easy access and mobility, varied land use, cultural complexity and diversity, and the right mixture of vibrancy and tranquillity.

Those subtle quantities can be achieved only if we work by taking the right direction while guiding the public and private investments into a better order. The undeserved settlements of Colombo have been a major concern of the Governments since the past three decades.

The Sustainable Township Program of the Ministry of Urban Development had carried out a comprehensive enumeration of low income settlements of Colombo during 1997/1998 and had identified the distribution of low income settlement in the City.

This may be the first ever accumulation of the statistical effort in this nature, which is being used as the main source of the dispersion of the information about slum and shanty population in the Capital city.

Although several attempts were made since the middle of the 19th century to ensure planned city development in Colombo, it was growing as an unplanned city.

This has resulted in haphazard expansion of the city activities including residential areas. It was evident, that about 50 per cent of the city’s residential population lives in low income areas that are currently known as “underserved settlements”.

It is also evident that, during the past few decades the conventional shelter development approaches have failed to give the expected results in the urban settings.

As a result, they were unable to prevent settlements of urban poor perpetuation of poverty on the other, while the same strategies were successful in rural areas. Though there are specific reasons for those successes in rural housing developments, it may not be parallel to the urban areas in reaching for those targets.

Creation of micro mechanisms, mobilisation of communities, credit and technical assistance, supplement of resources to some extent, have been given and strengthened to be succeeded in rural programs thus they have become a viable strategy for rural shelter development. On the other hand, in the rural areas “house” is considered more as a basic need rather than a commodity in the market.

In the case of urban development, there is a great importance to make sure that the urban housing strategies should be compatible with the market mechanism. Only then the sustainability and the physical environmental factors of the cities would prevail.

Providing urban shelter strategies in the Colombo city, being addressed solely for the provision of supplying basic needs, being failed so called free shelters for the homeless, the country has gone through good lessons for the past two decades.

The factors such as the limitation of urban lands, extreme increase of population in the city, more development strategies based on city areas, living standards of the riches in the urban areas, have now been turned the theories towards making high rise condominiums in the city which had earlier being discouraged by the Third World countries.

Thus, today in the world these high rise living has become the most characteristic feature of the modern city concepts. It has given good examples in the countries, particularly Singapore, Malaysia and other socialist countries as well.

In Sri Lanka, the Palin Mandira Condominium Housing Project has been initiated with the awakening of the “Mahinda Chinthana” concept, which has firmly stressed that every family in Sri Lanka should have a house of its own. In order to realise these objective, 65,000 homes will be built for people living in shanties and other non-formal houses in the Colombo City.

The Ministry of Urban Development and Sacred Areas Development has been entrusted to undertake this task to fulfill the aspirations of the dwellers in the underserved settlements by provisioning of housing with all infrastructure facilities, making a better living environment.

The other expectation of this program is to get the city or community into main stream of the development process in order to improve their living standards.

The REEL Company, to fulfill the above unique task within a short period of time with the prudent guidance of the Minister of Urban Development, has launched a well-planned program in this context.

In keeping with the Government’s policy on sheltering the poor in Colombo City, REEL has formulated a six year action plan to accommodate about 20,000 households in slums and shanties and liberated approximately 250 acres of land which could be utilised for re-housing and releasing for up market sale in order to finance the relocation housing.

The second phase of the “Palin Mandira” housing programme, consisting 50 houses located at Wadullawatta, in the Kolonnawa Electorate, will be handed over to the public on Tuesday at 9 a.m. with the participation of Minister of Urban Development and Sacred Area Development Dinesh Gunawardana and other guests, ministry officials and the general public.

The first phase of Palin Mandira was implemented at the beginning of this year in the Wanathamulla area, where 60 houses were built in three blocks of five storied buildings.

- Dharma S. SAMARANAYAKE