Mojaffar Hossain, who works at the public administration ministry as a class IV employee, has long been striving to get a government residence. He has already submitted applications several times to the ministry, but the authority concerned failed to provide him with accommodation due to severe shortage of official residences.
Once again Mojaffar has applied to the authority for allocating a house which would be vacant after five years.
He told the Dhaka Tribune that there is not a single official residence that could be allocated to him within next five years. “This is why I have applied again to get a house which would be vacant after five years.”
Bijli Rani Bishwas, a senior staff nurse working with a public hospital, is also trying to get an official residence. For this reason, she has long been keeping in touch with the authority concerned.
Failing to get a house as normal, she contacted a mediator to help her find out a house that could be allocated to her. Even though she gave him a handsome amount of money, finally she gave up hope for getting a house within a short time.
A good number of officials from assistant secretary to additional secretary are also waiting for the decision of the directorate of government accommodation, the authority for allocating official houses to public servants. But, the authority could not arrange houses for most of the officials due to its serious crisis.
Many officials meet the director of the directorate of government accommodation at his office or contact him over phone to resolve their problem. The director is getting hundreds of requests every day, but he has nothing to do, the officials concerned told the Dhaka Tribune last week.
Admitting the accommodation crisis and huge applications from public servants to get houses, Director of the DoGA Dr Ashraful Islam told the Dhaka Tribune: “We are facing a huge crisis of government accommodations in Dhaka and Chittagong cities as we have only 7% of houses against our demand.
“We do not build houses. We only allocate the houses to public servants. Public works department usually builds houses for them. As far as I know, the department has not built any official house for a long time. The number of employees has increased, but not the accommodation.”
According to the ministry of housing and public works, there are only 24,000 government residences in the country against around 1.3m public servants. The rest of the houses are in the district and upazila towns.
Of them, there are around 15,000 houses in Dhaka and Chittagong cities. There are about 13,000 houses in Dhaka against 200,000 public servants.
The DoGA only maintains the houses in Dhaka and Chittagong cities. The rest of the houses are maintained by the district administrations and executive engineers of local public works department.
According to the ministry, there are 5,595 houses for class I cadre, non-cadre and class II officials in Dhaka. Of them, around 86 bungalows and 206 superior class houses are distributed among ministers, state ministers and deputy ministers and important persons working with the statutory bodies of the country. Besides, at least 30,000 class I and class II officers are entitled to get around 5,000 D, E and F type buildings while about 7,500 A, B and C type houses are reserved for class III and class IV employees.
According to the DoGA officials, although the authority has not constructed any new building, several old buildings have already become unusable. Most of the buildings at Azimpur staff quarters and Motijheel AGB Colony are in a bad state. The authority has already stopped allocating those buildings.
Ashraful Islam said it’s a profitable project for the government as allotment receivers have to pay rent regularly. The authority deducts house rents from their monthly salaries every month.
“I think the government should take steps to construct new buildings as government accommodation that would mitigate sufferings of public servants. If the initiative is taken, public servants would be able to concentrate on their responsibilities,” he added.
Influential people have grabbed government lands in Keraniganj and Kamrangirchar areas. The government can easily construct houses after recovering its lands from illegal grabbers.
Meanwhile, the officials concerned informed that the government took up two projects in 2009 and 2010 to resolve the accommodation crisis.
The projects were taken to construct buildings at Azimpur and Motijheel government colonies for public servants, taking into account maximum use of government properties and solution to the crisis of public accommodations.
