ROURKELA: Odisha State Housing Board (OSHB) MD Sagarika Pattnayak on Wednesday assured to restore its office at Rourkela and vest it with certain powers and also set up an eight-storey building complex with commercial space and residential flats at Basanti Colony soon.
During an interaction with a delegation of OSHB House Owners’ Association (OSHBHOA) led by its president Bimal Kumar Bisi and secretary Prakash Chandra Padhi here, Pattnayak was apprised of difficulties faced by the OSHB allottees. The Association also urged the MD to announce a new project to cater to the city’s growing housing demand.
Pattnayak informed that OSHB has decided to restore its office at Rourkela in the next couple of months to provide services including ownership transfer, issuance of bank loan clearance certificate and registration of unregistered houses of Chhend Colony to save the allottees the pain of visiting Bhubaneswar. She also apprised the delegation that the OSHB plans to set up a multi-storey building complex with commercial space and residential flats at Basanti Colony. Land for all the houses at the complex would be converted into freehold by March 2023 for which formalities by the Law and Revenue departments are at different stages.
Pattnayak also discussed possibility of setting up a new housing project in the city with the ADM and Rourkela Municipal Corporation (RMC) Commissioner Dr Subhankar Mohapatra. Bisi said the Association suggested the OSHB MD to ensure allotment of housing units for new project through lottery system and do away with the practice of auction as there is a possibility that a few wealthy persons would corner all the units. He said the delegation also suggested to discuss setting up of new housing projects with the Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) management on vacant sector areas on the plant premises with proposal to reserve 50 per cent of the units for existing and retired employees of SAIL.