Rajahmundry/Ongole: The state Housing Development Corporation has taken up geo-tagging of several lakhs of houses constructed under Indiramma, Racchhabanda, Indira Awas Yojana and other schemes in the last 10 years in the state and the move is aimed at ensuring that only genuine beneficiaries get allocation of houses and avoid any duplicity of allocation to the same beneficiary in future.
The housing assistant engineers and work inspectors equipped with a smart phone having the requisite software installed in it and also having a GPS facility, will visit the houses and collect data. As the houses are under various stages of construction, a specific colour is allotted to indicate whether a house is constructed up to its basement level or to roof level or completed, in the data being collected. They will record the coordinates like latitude and longitude of the location of the house with the GPS.
They will take photographs of the housing unit either with front or rear facing and in case of availability of its beneficiary, he or she will be photogra-phed with the house in the background. If the beneficiary is not available, his or her kin will be photographed.
The data thus collected will be sent to the concerned deputy executive engineers and if they are not convinced over it, the AEs have to redo the exercise. Later, the data will be uploaded to the central server of the corporation. General public can access the location of the housing units on Indian Space Research Organisation’s satellite mapping tool Bhuvan, which is similar to Google Earth and Wiki-mapia.
Similar to the way one can find places on Google maps, these housing units can be located on Bhuvan maps. The housing authorities maintain that the geo-tagging will help them find out the status of the execution of the construction of housing units and any disposal of the unit to a third party.
The state government has withheld release of money to the beneficiaries of several housing units for want of information pertaining to their status. Once the geo-tagging is completed, the state can release funds as the construction works progress.
In Godavari districts alone, the geo-tagging is being carried out to over 6.30 lakh houses while in Prakasam, nearly 2.37 lakh houses in 56 mandals to be covered.
East Godavari housing project director D. Selvaraj said, “As we have completed Aadhaar seeding of the houses, we are taking up geo-tagging to ensure only eligible persons get benefit and we will complete the exercise by end of December.”
