Union urban development secretary Kiran Dhingra at the workshop in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, January 7: The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) will soon be ready with a detailed analysis of its slums and have a geographic information system (GIS) enabled database. This would help the authorities plan the rehabilitation of slum-dwellers in low-cost housing schemes.

The detailed GIS analysis will also include the list of the beneficiaries and their names with their biometric card details. With this, there would be no scope for the beneficiaries of the low-cost housing schemes to misuse the benefits given to them. The civic authorities would store the details of their biometric cards to be given under the Unique Identification Authority of India.

This will ensure that the beneificiaries are restricted to the areas where they are allotted houses under Rajiv Awas Yojana and do not move out to other areas and encroach land. The authorities say that there are many slum-dwellers who have put their houses on rent and have shifted to new areas and created new slums hoping to get more benefits.

“The new system and its integration with biometric cards will enable us to identify the ghost beneficiaries,’’ said vice-chairman of the Bhubaneswar Development Authority, Deoranjan Kumar Singh, who is also the state nodal officer for the Rajiv Awas Yojana.

As of now, the BMC has got an overall database of 377 slums, but there is no micro-level data. The GIS-based analysis, which will end by January, will have all the data like location, topography, terrain analysis, the areas under encroachment, sanitation and road network. The GIS database will be prepared by integrating satellite database, along with maps of different components, digitally by a private agency. The GIS database of seven slums have been prepared so far.

Speaking at a state-level workshop on “Planning for Slum-free Cities’’ here today, Singh said: “A draft slum development plan is under active consideration of the government. The planners doing the zonal development plan of the Bhubaneswar Development Plan Area (BDPA) are also advised to earmark 10 per cent of the housing zones for the slum-dwellers.’’

Inaugurating the workshop, Union urban development secretary Kiran Dhingra said: “Though the city has got some remarkable achievement in developing the GIS-based micro-level slum profiling task, the process of approval of the housing projects in the state should be made much faster. The delay in the approval process is leading to a hike of 15 per cent in the overall project cost.’’

State housing and urban development secretary Saurabh Garg said: “Orissa had 13 per cent urban population in 2009. It is expected to be 22 per cent or more in 2011.”

Representatives of urban local bodies of Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Puri, Sambalpur, Rourkela and Berhampur participated in the workshop, which workshop was organised by the Regional Centre for Urban and Environmental Studies, Lucknow. The centre under Lucknow University looks after urban development issues in the eastern and north-eastern states.