PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has planned to construct around 750,000 houses in different districts of the province for poor people and low paid income groups in the next five years in line with the policy of Prime Minister Imran Khan of constructing five million houses in the country.
“We are ready for implementation of the vision in the targeted period which is subjected to the provision of timely funds for the construction of these houses. We have chalked out a comprehensive and inclusive mechanism to achieve this gigantic task,” said Muhammad Yaqoob Khan, additional director of planning at the Provincial Housing Authority (PHA).
“The share of the province in five million houses in term of the country’s population comes to around 750,000 houses,” he said, adding demands for affordable houses had increased manifold in the province due to rapid increase in population and long presence of the refugees. With the construction of 750,000 houses, he said the demands of the affordable households would considerably be decreased.
He said that the province has 2.6 million houses and still required about two million more. The Housing Department will launch two mega housing projects – Peshawar Model Town (PMT) at Peshawar and the CPEC City near Swabi on Peshawar-Islamabad Motorway where the majority of the houses would be constructed in line with the policy.
“PMT will be constructed over an area of 107,000 kanals where around 100,000 new houses besides commercial and other services buildings would be built,” he said, adding that PC-I, feasibility studies and detailed design of this mega project has been completed. The payment to landowners has already started after imposition of Section-IV for acquiring of land.
He said that Rs35 billion would be spent on the purchase of land for PMT which will consist of the state-of-the-art Education City, Sports Complex, Media Enclave and Provincial Assembly’s buildings that would add the beauty of Peshawar. The CPEC City is another mega housing project that would be established at 80,000 kanals with an estimated cost of around 4.4 billion dollars as the process of acquiring of the land has been expedited.
The official said around Rs200 billion would be spent on development of infrastructure of CPEC City. In addition to the construction of around 62,000 residential houses, education and commercial zones, public buildings, apartments, golf course, theme park and sports facilities would also be constructed in the project.
