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Strap: The near- ₹1 cr monthly profits not even enough to pay employee salaries amounting to ₹3.5 cr; staff sitting idle as last project was launched in 2016
The Chandigarh Housing Board (CHB) is proving to be City Beautiful’s proverbial white elephant, eating into the taxpayer’s resources mostly to pay its 400-odd employees with no tangible output to show for.
In signs that things will get even tougher for the board, its budget has also been slashed to ₹100 crore from the usual ballpark of ₹350 crore. Notably, the board had in the budget estimate for the year 2023-24 projected the income to stand at ₹47 crore against a spending of ₹33 crore — a profit of only ₹14 crore. The expenditure was estimated to be 45% higher than the previous year, while the receipts were to be up 58%, but the targets were not met.
A UT administration undertaking, CHB was set up in 1976 with the primary objective of providing reasonably priced and good-quality housing to the residents of the then burgeoning city.
The board, however, has had no major venture in the works and no complete project to show for in the past seven years. It has not convened its board meeting for the past nine months. Last year, it met only twice — in February and May.
Hitesh Puri, a member of the board of directors, said, “Despite our requests to the authorities to hold a board meeting once in two months, they have failed to convene one for the past 10 months. The service of the CHB experts should be utilised in other departments of UT administration.”
The last CHB project saw it offer 200 two-bedroom flats in Sector 51 for ₹69 lakh each in 2016. No other work has seen completion since, raising eyebrows over the board’s utility.
It is in the backdrop of this apparent lack of activity that CHB employees continue to draw a salary totalling ₹3.5 crore per month. Besides, around 100 new employees have been added.
Monthly income from all collective sources, however, hovers around the ₹1-crore mark as sale of residential and commercial properties, the major earner for the board, has fallen flat in recent years.
UT adviser-cum-chairperson of the board, Rajeev Verma, did not respond to the calls despite repeated attempts.
Former chairperson Maninder Singh Bains, meanwhile says, the engineers and other staff are sitting idle and should be shifted to other departments like UT engineering department, Smart City Limited or municipal corporation, so that their services can be utilised and public money is not wasted
Reflecting on past experiences, Puranjit Singh, a former chief engineer of CHB, recalled a precedent set in the early 1990s. “During a period of two years marked by limited assignments, the CHB engineers were deployed at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research as well as other organisations lacking engineering divisions,” he recalled.
Stalled schemes
UT administrator Banwarilal Purohit put CHB’s ambitious Sector-53 General Housing Scheme on hold in August last year, terming it unnecessary. Consequently, the board cancelled the ₹200-crore tenders floated on August 2 last year for the construction of 340 flats on nine acres of land.
The administrator had also told CHB not to pursue another housing scheme at IT Park, which has been caught in environmental clearance tangles. In October last year, the Union ministry of environment and forest had refused to accord approval to the scheme, featuring 728 flats in three categories, stating that the project site falls in the eco-sensitive zone of the Sukhna Wildlife Sanctuary.
As a result, now, no housing scheme, either in the private or public sector, is in the works in the city.
As of March 2019, CHB had completed the construction of a total of 67,565 houses across various categories, including rehabilitation schemes. The board, which is now functioning from a five-star-rated seven-storied green building in Sector 9, was constructed at the cost of nearly ₹60 crore.
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