Prime minister Imran Khan on Wednesday announced the launch of 5 million housing project to provide housing facility to what he called the less privileged strata of society. “We have launched our most ambitious, landmark housing policy of building 5mn homes in 5 yrs. InshaAllah this will provide affordable houses for our less privileged strata of society, plus 6mn jobs, create demand in 40 industries directly involved in house building & attract FDI.”, IK said in a tweet after inauguration of the project. The idea as per se is good but building five million houses within a short span of time is not an easy job for the government confronted with multiple challenges. It is indeed a Herculean task that needs time and equally a massive amount of money to execute and accomplish this gigantic Naya Pakistan Housing Programme. Pakistan is one amongst dozens of other countries where low-income families can not even afford to buy or build their own house to live in. According to UN estimates Pakistan is the home to over 20 million homeless people, living in slums or rented houses in the overstretched cities and towns of the country, which constitutes 10% of total population. Although this is not for the first time that a political party in power has promised to provide shelter to this economically downtrodden segment of the society. It was PPP’s founder chairman ZAB (late) who for the first time coined this iconic eye-catching slogan of providing Roti, Kapra and Makkan to poor masses but so far the party has not been able to materialize this dream. And then the similar kind of initiatives were taken by Pakistan Muslim League during its tenure in the office. The Punjab government too had launched a “low-cost housing scheme” under Ashiana Housing Project (AHP), with a view to provide affordable housing to homeless but the project failed to take off soon after its launch in 2010, owing to different reasons.
Now that the PTI government had formally announced to launch Naya Pakistan Housing programme, one hopes that the incumbent government unlike its predecessors will utilize all its resources to make this project a success and fulfill the promise of providing a modest accommodation to masses at affordable prices. Besides taking necessary steps to execute this mega project it is also imperative that the newly elected government should launch a special scheme whereby interest-free loans could be provided to the poor for house building purposes.