KATHMANDU, Jan 14: The National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) has initiated a survey to identify households in all the 31 earthquake-affected districts that don't have family members of working age and therefore face difficulties with the reconstruction of their houses. NRA aims to provide additional support to such households for house reconstruction.
In order to support households identified as eligible for housing grants but lacking any breadwinner, NRA has asked all the local bodies in the 31 quake-hit districts to recommend such households to it by January 18, said Bhishma Kumar Bhusal, NRA deputy-spokesperson. Such households will include families of those over 70 alone, the physically disabled, single widows, and families with children below 15 who lost their parents in the earthquake and have no one to look to for support in-house reconstruction
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“We are still in the data collection phase. But we aim to seek the support of non-government organizations involved in earthquake reconstruction and also mobilize our own resources for helping families who have the money but do not have any family member of working age (15 to 60) for reconstructing their damaged houses,” he added.
“We learned that many households receiving the housing grant have not been able to begin reconstruction for lack of family members of working age. Some of them have not been able to hire construction workers while other households have difficulty accessing markets for construction materials. So, we aim to provide logistics support to such families,” he added.
He also said that the task of finalizing the list of households needing additional support will begin once the local bodies recommend the households on the basis of criteria set by NRA. “Once we get the data from the local bodies, we will tally it with our own records collected for the housing grants. After that, we will sit with all the stakeholders and figure out a clear action plan,” Bhusal added.
Some 767,705 households in the 31 districts were finalized as eligible for housing grants of Rs 300,000 by NRA following a technical survey. If these, 676,849 have already signed grant agreements.
