Twenty-four houses in the “Suhada Gama” Model Village in Polonnaruwa district were inaugurated and handed over to their occupants on Friday, built with grant support from the Government of India.
High Commissioner of India to Sri Lanka Santosh Jha and Deputy Minister of Housing, Construction and Water Supply T.B. Sarath opened the village jointly, Hiru News reported. Speaker of Parliament Dr. Jagath Wickramarathna attended the ceremony.
District parliamentarians, the chairman and senior officials of the National Housing Development Authority, and officials from the Polonnaruwa district administration were also present.
The scheme behind it
The Model Village Housing Project runs across all 25 districts of the island, implemented with Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Housing, Construction and Water Supply under a memorandum of understanding signed between the two governments in October 2017.
It provides housing for 600 low-income families — 24 houses in each district, with recipients chosen by the District Housing Committees.
Polonnaruwa is the 21st district to receive its village. Model villages have already been handed over in Batticaloa, Vavuniya, Jaffna, Kandy, Gampaha, Anuradhapura, Badulla, Matale, Puttalam, Colombo, Trincomalee, Monaragala, Kilinochchi, Mannar, Mullaitivu, Ratnapura, Ampara, Kurunegala, Kegalle and Kalutara.
The project is roughly 98.5 percent complete, Hiru reported, with the remaining four model villages expected to be inaugurated and handed to beneficiaries soon.
In context
Housing grants sit alongside a widening set of Indian-funded projects in Sri Lanka this year, among them medical equipment worth Rs. 600 million for Deniyaya Hospital and a donation of malathion for dengue control. New Delhi and Colombo are separately in talks over memoranda on Kankesanthurai Port.
Not reported
Hiru did not give the value of the Polonnaruwa grant or of the project as a whole, name the four districts still awaiting handover, or give a completion date for them. It did not report how the Polonnaruwa families were selected, or whether the houses carry any conditions of tenure. No other verified newsroom had carried the handover at the time of writing.
