Chennai: Taking a swipe at some States that had covered slum areas with tarpaulin with a view to not letting visiting foreign dignitaries see them, Chief Minister M K Stalin said that his government was not for such cover ups but for building proper structures for the people to live and thus improving their living standards also.
Stalin was speaking after inaugurating 840 apartments constructed at a cost of Rs 111.80 crore by the Tamil Nadu Urban Habitat Development Board at Gowthamapuram in Kolathur, his own Assembly constituency, on Monday when he recalled the various efforts he had made to repair the earlier building that had 400 houses when he was the leader of the opposition.
Now the old structure has been removed and replaced with a brand new building as part of the State’s efforts to provide proper housing for the poor, which started during the tenure of C N Annadurai as Chief Minister itself.
Annadurai, who saw god in the smile of the poor, was concerned about tenements in slums catching fire during summer or by stray embers from the kitchen stoves and getting inundated during the rains and first launched a scheme to provide houses with asbestos roof, he said.
After Annadurai’s successor, M Karunanidhi, came to power, he launched the Slum Clearance Board and constructed houses to rehabilitate the people, saying that he saw Anna in the smile of the poor, Stalin said adding that the board has now been renamed as Urban Habitat Development Board and that he saw Karunanidhi in the smile of the poor.
The present government had undertaken 219 housing projects to build 94,557 apartments at a cost of Rs 10,295 crore, the Chief Minister said.
