Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe and six Cabinet Ministers of the National Unity Government will visit Hatton today to issue title deeds to 2,864 families in the area.
The Prime Minister with Estate New Villages, Infrastructure and Community Development Minister Palani Digambaram, Agriculture Minister Duminda Dissanayake, Lands and Parliamentary Reforms Minister Gayantha Karunathillake, Plantation Industries Minister Naveen Dissanayake, National Co-existence, Dialogue and Official Languages Minister Mano Ganeshan and State Minister of Education V. Radhakrishnan will attend the event.
The event marks the second phase of the program of transforming plantation estates into villages and bestowing land/house ownership rights on estate workers in the area.
“The total number of houses required under the program of providing single, independent housing units on seven perches of land to the plantation community is 160,000 and 50,000 of them will be constructed within the next five years, under the government’s National Plan of Action, for distribution to the plantation community,” Minister Digambaram said.
Cabinet approval has been received to construct 6,800 houses and the rest of the houses will be constructed soon, he said.
He held preliminary discussions last week with the Indian High Commission in Colombo and signed an MoU on the construction of 10,000 houses for the workers, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged during his visit to Sri Lanka in May this year and the program will be started soon under the coordination of his Ministry, he said. The construction of about 1,340 houses under a similar program of constructing 4,000 houses has been completed while the remaining are under construction, he said.
His Ministry received Rs. 00 million for the housing projects in 2015, Rs. 2 billion in 2016 and Rs. 2 billion for the current year.
“There will be no political discrimination whatsoever in the construction and distribution of houses and priority will be given to workers of areas vulnerable to landslides,” the Minister said.