Hyderabad: With skyrocketing real estate prices becoming a barometer to measure the progress by the politicians, owning a house in Hyderabad has become a pipe-dream for the middle class.
Even for a person like Raju, a contract employee with a government corporation earning Rs 17,000 per month, buying a house is a dream.
“We don’t get any DA (dearness allowance) and are not protected against inflation. My salary increases only when there is a new PRC (pay revision commission). As I hardly make ends meet, I have left the thought of buying a house. I cannot afford the down payment needed to buy one. Banks won’t give me a loan. I will have to mortgage gold. Owning a house is a dream for me now. I know many who left the city for good,” Raju said.
He is not alone, even white collar employees undergo the same ordeal. Maria Justina, an English language lecturer in a private engineering college, said that many of her colleagues are struggling to pay EMIs and she could buy the house only because of her four year stint in Oman.
Senior citizen C. Guna Reddy confided that he was able to buy a house in Vijaynagar Colony only after his son landed up with a job in the IT sector. “I could have bought a house in the city outskirts with my income and life savings. This would have meant living without basic amenities like drainage and sewage facilities,” he said.
According to an official in the Telangana Housing Board, the housing board has 700 acres of dispute-free land in the state. Out of this, 573.16 acres in Rangareddy district. Its subsidiary Deccan Infrastructure and Land Holdings Limited (DILL), which is embroiled in a dispute with the Andhra Pradesh government, has a land bank of 1,800 acres.”
Commenting on the situation, Johnson Koyyada, an expert on real estate, said that the dispute-free status of land would go a long way in helping the middle class. Citing the instance of Durgam Cheruvu abutting Amar Society, he said that the structures there are on FTL as per the irrigation department but are residential zones as per the GHMC master plan.
Extending the metro to the nook and corner and facilitating last-mile connectivity to the workplace will go a long way in reducing the rush to buy property in the western part of the city. This will help in reducing prices to an extent, says V. Rajasekhar Reddy, general secretary of CREDAI, Hyderabad.
