Construction of 71k Indiramma houses completed: Ponguleti
Hyderabad: The Revenue and Housing Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy on Monday informed that the State government has so far completed 71,000 houses.
During a review meeting with officials at Secretariat he said that from the set a target of constructing 4.50 lakh Indiramma houses across the state this year (with a cost of Rs 22,500 crore),and so far, sanction letters have been handed over to 2.65 lakh beneficiaries. He said that from 71,000 about three thousand houses have been completed up to the walls and slabs.
He said that incomplete double bedroom houses are being allotted to eligible beneficiaries who do not have house plots in the Indiramma survey. He said that it has been decided to take up and complete the construction in the Beneficiary-led Construction (BLC) mode from the current contractor mode.
He said that besides providing basic amenities in double bedroom houses, 1.61 lakh incomplete houses were completed at a cost of Rs. 640 crore and allotted to 98 thousand beneficiaries. He said that another 69 thousand houses are incomplete and are in various stages of construction and these will be completed in BLC mode. He instructed the officials to identify the eligible beneficiaries for this and allot them to them and complete this process as soon as possible.
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For example, a judge gets the same number of units for presiding over a cross-examination of a witness, no matter the time spent on the cross-examination. Similarly, a judge gets the same number of units for the disposal of a certain category of cases regardless of the complexity of individual cases within that category. The inevitable result of such a performance system based on quantifying work is that it can be easily gamed by judges, who now have an incentive to pick and choose easy cases in order to meet their targets, at the expense of delaying complicated or risky cases. The third component is the phenomenon of the 'revolving docket'. Unlike in most other countries, where a case remains on the docket of a single judge, the district judiciary has a revolving docket due to a policy of transfer of judges within states and also within districts. This policy ensures that a case revolves between dockets of different judges since cases remain in the same court while judges get transferred. This 'revolving docket' increases inefficiencies as cases remain partially heard, while also letting the judges pick and choose the easiest cases in order to avoid disciplinary inquiries and earn 'units' necessary to secure a good rating. As long as the 'revolving docket' exists, it will be impossible to hold any single judge accountable for delays in disposing of a case. Reorienting the public debate on reforms to these issues of judicial governance and away from the resource crunch narrative will be crucial in tackling the root of the problem of delays in India's district courts. The writers are lawyers. Tareekh Pe Justice: Reforms for India's District Courts is their latest book
