October 09, 2006	Monday	Ramazan 15, 1427

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PESHAWAR, Oct 8: With his native Garhi Habibullah, a semi-urban locality in the Hazara region, making a slow recovery from the disaster which hit the region on October 8 last year, Javed Tanoli nad many others are still waiting for the second housing grant installment of Rs75,000 to begin reconstruction of their collapsed houses.

The delay in the release of the grant, due mainly to bureaucratic bottlenecks, would render many people to spend the upcoming winter again in tents and temporary shelters lacking proper heating facilities in many parts of the district.

The situation in Garhi Habibullah, situated close to Balakot and Muzaffarabad, is not different from many other affected parts where reconstruction of houses has yet to pick momentum.

Though the recently established prefabricated structures housing health and education facilities have come as a big psychological boost for the people of Garhi Habibullah, a large number of them have not been able to come out of their individual predicament largely because of bureaucratic hurdles hampering distribution of housing subsidy.

In majority of the cases affected people have not removed debris of their houses in old Garhi Habibullah city which suffered major destruction.

Narrow streets which were covered by fallen structures and collapsed houses are still not clear, requiring a major effort to be made usable.

Views expressed by many homeless people living in distress in Garhi Habibullah and its surrounding areas appear to be in sharp contrast to what the Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Authority (Erra) is saying in its attempts to make people at large believe in its achievements.

Mr Tanoli’s mother and his brother, who is a teacher, saw their houses turn into rubble after the old structures situated in a narrow street of Garhi Habibullah could not withstand the tremors.

While his mother and brother had received the first installment of Rs25,000 each as housing subsidy some 10 months back after teams comprising civil and military personnel conducted the first survey soon after the earthquake, they have failed to start reconstruction even one year after the earthquake.

They are among many dwellers of Garhi Habibullah who have yet to receive the second installment of housing subsidy even though teams comprising military personnel and teachers visited them a coupe of months back and collected their data in line with the second survey conducted in their area recently.

“I have been running from pillar to post for months to correct a minor mistake which my brother committed at the time of filling the second survey form,” said Mr Tanoli.

His brother said that there were hundreds of families in Garhi Habibullah who were anxiously waiting for the second installment.

Since the earthquake brought down their houses in an old Garhi Habibullah locality, Mr Tanoli and his brother’s family have been living on rent in a relative’s house, whereas those who cannot afford rented houses have to live in tents or temporary shelters made with corrugated iron sheets.

Iqbal Abbasi, a local musician whose small house was destroyed, visits a local bank almost every day to enquire about the installment.

He had opened an account in line with an agreement with Erra some 10 months back.

“One of the bank’s employees once gave me Rs10,000 saying that he had paid me from his own pocket and since then there has been no word about the second installment of Rs75,000,” he said.

His family lives in a tent near the damaged structure of his house.

He said that while the local Erra staff told him that his second installment had been transferred to his bank account, the bank staff denied it.

Erra Chairman Altaf Saleem said that barring a few cases in which payments had been delayed because of different reasons, Erra had to its credit a major achievement of signing agreements with some 570,000 people out of a total of about 600,000 deserving the housing subsidy.

The authority, according to him, had distributed by Sept 15 Rs50 billion as housing subsidy and compensation.