An act like the mother of humanity indeed!

Abdul Khaleque Khandker

Yesterday it was a most remarkable day in the history of Bangladesh, a most auspicious day for the homeless, landless people of the country.

Why shouldn’t we call it to be a historical day of the world? It is because, there’s no such an example in the world that the head of any government has ever given away such a large number of houses and pieces of land among the homeless people of their country free of cost.

The worthy heir of the father of the nation, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina handed over not one or two, but as many as 66,189 houses to homeless families in the country as part of her government’s commitment to bring all landless and homeless families under housing facility on the occasion of the “Mujib Borsha/Year.

in the beautiful morning of late January yesterday, when the Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the progrm, people from home and abroad said, “Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has acted like the Mother of Humanity. She set an example of a kind and benign mother indeed!”

Prime Minister herself said, there is hardly any example in the world that such a large number of houses were distributed among the landless and homeless people at a time in any country.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina joined the houses handing over ceremony virtually from her official residence Ganabhaban.

The government has built 66,189 houses at a cost of Taka 1,168 crore for homeless people on the occasion of the Mujib Borsha. Some one lakh more houses will also be distributed among those people in the next month, is learnt from agency reports.

This mega project as named, Ashrayan Project rehabilitated 3,715 families by constructing 743 barracks under 44 project villages in 36 upazilas in 21 districts during the Mujib Year, it is also learned. Besides, Armed Forces Divison is constructing barracks for landless and homeless families.

The Ashrayan Project has prepared a list of 885,622 families in 2020, including 293,361 landless and homeless families, and 592,261 families having 1-10 decimal land but no housing facility.

Ashrayan has also rehabilitated 320,058 landless and homeless families from 1997 to December 2020.

On the other hand, Ashran-2 project (July 2010-June 2022) has a target to rehabilitate 250,000 landless, homeless and displaced families at a cost of Taka 4,840.28 crore.

Ashrayan has already rehabilitated 192,277 landless and homeless families across the country from July 2010 to June 2019.

A total of 48,500 landless and homeless families have been rehabilitated in barracks and 143,777 families having own land (1-10 decimal) but no capacity to construct houses in semi-barracks, corrugated iron sheet barracks and specially designed houses.

In addition, the government also constructed 20 five-story buildings at Khurushkul in Cox’s Bazar for 600 families, who are climate refugees as a special gift by the Prime Minister.

Armed Forces Division is also implementing more 119 multi-storey buildings and related activities through Detailed Project Proposal (DPP), all this information is also known from the agency reports.