Rs. 1 lakh for house repair

Kathmandu, Dec. 25: The earthquake victims, who are on the list of getting house reconstruction grants but haven’t pulled down their partially damaged houses, can reapply for retrofitting their structures.

The National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) Sunday said that those households opting for retrofitting would receive Rs. 100,000 – instead of Rs. 300,000 – to repair their houses.

“The households that received Rs. 50,000 in the first installment but want to repair the house instead of pulling it down and reconstruction will be facilitated from this provision,” NRA chief executive officer Sushil Gyawali said at a press conference organised on the occasion of first anniversary of the establishment of the reconstruction body.

The NRA has already prepared working procedure required for obtaining money for the house repair.

Gyawali said that more than 40,100 houses had been constructed in the quake-hit districts and 17,144 houses are in the construction process.

“The NRA has given priority to the house reconstruction. About 626,036 houses of the 14 districts severely-hit by the earthquake have been listed on the grant list. 543,107 households have signed the reconstruction grant agreement with the government and 458,592 households have received the first installment of the grant,” he said.

The NRA said that more than 204,000 complaints were registered at the local level, with most of them claiming that they were not on the beneficiaries’ list even though their houses were damaged by the earthquake.

It has reviewed 79,322 complaints which will be published soon.

Meanwhile, reconstruction of 15 heritages has been completed while 69 religious, cultural and historical heritages are in the reconstruction process.

“Similarly, 200 health centres were reconstructed with prefabricated materials and 169 health centres are being constructed. We aim at completing the reconstruction of about 2,300 school buildings,” said Gyawali.

He said that the government had initiated works to prepare master plan for the development of seven world heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley along with Gorkha and Nuwakot palaces.

The government is also planning to develop 25 integrated settlements with the ‘build back better’ concept.

Gyawali said that the absence of elected representatives at the local bodies, lack of effective coordination among the concerned stakeholders and process-oriented government working system were the major challenges in the reconstruction process.

“However, the NRA takes ownership of its every activity and vows to move ahead by correcting its weaknesses,” he said.

Secretary of the NRA Dr. Sanjaya Sharma said that the reconstruction body had been performing well.

“We did not have the experience of tackling the disaster of this scale so there might be some weaknesses but the NRA is making significant progress,” he said.