The Union Ministry for Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation (HUPA) has identified sites for in situ rehabilitation of slums in the city. To be taken up on a pilot basis, the project will be initiated in slum clusters that have come up on Railway land and perilously close to the tracks in Zakhira and Choona Mandi.

A meeting of officials from HUPA and the Railway authorities was held recently to draw up a plan for clearing out the slums that have come up near the tracks. “There are about 9,000 hutments that have come up in these areas on Railway-owned land. The Ministry is now working out a plan to rehabilitate these people within one kilometre of their existing dwellings,” said an official who was part of the meeting.

“To recover past dues and to have adequate finances to be able to purchase power for the coming months”

Power consumers in the city will have to brace for spending more on their monthly bills as all three power distribution companies – the Anil Ambani-owned BRPL and BYPL and the Tatas-owned Tata Power -- want a further hike in power tariffs to not only recover their “past dues” but also “to have adequate finances to be able to purchase power for the coming months”.

NGO urges L-G to strop misuse of green areas

To meet the increasing demand for housing in the Capital, the Delhi Development Authority has decided to change land use of a marshland in Dheerpur and announced a housing project for the Delhi Police on the site. Incidentally, the same marshland had been designated as a green area in 2010, after the environment department declined to allow a housing project at the site on the grounds that the designated area is fit for water harvesting.

Improved water and sanitation facilities, better housing, streamlined transportation systems and waste management are some of the services that smaller cities in the country can look forwards to in the next phase of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the flagship programme of the Union Urban Development Ministry.

The Ministry is keen to fund projects that will allow smaller cities that are fast moving towards urbanisation a chance to have and upgrade basic services.

The Delhi Government has sought the Centre’s permission to allow it to divert the gas supply meant for the Gas Turbine Power Plant and the Indraprastha Plant to its new plant at Bawana. Doing so, will help increase production at Bawana, which is currently being run much below its installed capacity of 1500 MW.

With no additional supply of gas in sight, and the production of power at the three power plants dismally low, the Delhi Government has decided to juggle its existing supply of gas to ensure maximum utilisation of the fuel and better production of power.

Waste-to-energy plants that are touted by the Government as the only solution to the city’s multiplying waste and shrinking waste dumps have taken away livelihood opportunities from a large number

Justice Sachar writes to Sheila: “Consumers will have to pay more for services”

A non-government organisation, the Water Privatisation-Commercialisation Resistance Committee (WPCRC), has written to Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit against privatising the water sector in the Capital. Drawing comparisons with privatisation of the power sector carried out earlier, the WPCRC has pointed out that bringing private companies into the water sector would mean consumers having to pay more for services.

Delhi’s power privatisation model has been more successful than Odisha and has been a boon to all the stakeholders, claims a report on the power sector by SBI Cap Securities.

The findings of the report are shot in the arm for the Delhi Government that hails the unbundling of the power sector as a major achievement. The report claims the distribution reforms implemented by the Delhi Government are “quite effective, unlike seen in states like Odisha. Post transition period [2002-2007], we feel the distribution reform implemented in Delhi has been a boon to all the stakeholders.

The Union Urban Development Ministry has constituted a working group to suggest ways for the preservation of water bodies in the urban areas. Rapid disappearance of water bodies from the urban landscape has sounded an alarm vis-à-vis water shortfall and has also put a considerable strain on States’ spending to meet the demand for water.

A case in point is Bangalore, which despite having a Lake Development Authority that is considered a model worth replicating, is being forced to spend Rs. 3,000 crore a year on electricity, which is consumed for supplying water from the Cauvery.

Indian cities are fast-expanding at the cost of rural areas, says U.N. report

New Delhi and Mumbai figure low on the list of prosperous cities across the globe, but have the potential to make it to the top rung, says a United Nation’s report. Released in the city on Wednesday, the State of the World’s Cities report by the U.N. Habitat ranks New Delhi at 58 and while Mumbai has been placed at 52 among 95 cities. The reasons for Indian cities being ranked low is the poor status of development indicators like infrastructure, environmental conditions and avenues for employment.