A three-day regional workshop on Promoting Access to Affordable Land and Housing is underway in the capital. The participants from South Asia, in next two days, will look into policy challenges in the region while trying to address the issue of house and land in the cities. The workshop is organised jointly by the Works and Human Settlement Ministry and the World Bank.
Affordable housing is an issue affecting almost every city dwellers in South Asia. It is estimated that the region, by 2030, will have over 300 million people moving in to cities where land and housing are already getting scarce.
At the regional workshop on promoting access to affordable housing and land in South Asia, Ming Zhang from the World Bank says governments should come up with schemes that would help low income groups’ access affordable housing.
“You don’t have a magic solution. Even in advanced economies, middle and low income cannot afford housing. The only way to get out of it is focusing on the supply-which is getting more lands for building houses and targeting low income groups to have some subsidies to be able to have housing said ” Ming Zhang.
In Bhutan, subsidies like low cost housing is slow and the existing ones do not meet the demand of the civil servants. For 2000 units of such housing in the country, there are about 24,000 civil servants.
“We are looking at low cost technology in order to increase the affordability of housing in the country. This will bring down the cost of construction and also we are looking at indigenous materials in our construction, which should discourage importing the materials- a reason why constructing houses is expensive,” said the National Housing Development Corporation Limited’s Managing Director Ugyen Chewang.
The Corporation has already invested about Nu. 250 in Samdrup Jongkhar, Phuentsholing, Gasa and Lhuentse in constructing low cost housing, some of which are expected to complete in next couple of months. There is also a plan to construct 239 units complex in Thimphu.
