Land to be reclaimed to meet housing needs of Malé people

Speaker of Parliament, Former President Mohamed Nasheed | Photo: Vnews

Malé, Maldives – Speaker of Parliament and Former President Mohamed Nasheed has said that additional land is to be reclaimed to provide lands for housing to Malé people.

After Minister of National Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Mohamed Aslam’s answer to Galolhu south constituency MP, Eva Abdulla stating that there were plans for providing land to Malé people for housing and that the details will be given by President Solih, Speaker Nasheed said that ministers must provide all the information they had to the parliament.

Speaker Nasheed went on to say that the government was working on getting a loan for the reclamation project and that as soon as the loan was secured that the government will initiate the project. He also added that when the land has been reclaimed that people would be given land to build their homes as soon as possible.

This comes while 1,200 land plots or fifteen percent of the land is to be allocated for housing purposes as a way to tackle congestion and housing shortages in the capital city, was announced to be given from K. Gulhifalhu after the reclamation of the lagoon will be completed. This was announced by Minister Aslam in July 2020 while speaking at parliament.

The government had previously stated that there were 17,073 families are in need of housing in Malé. According to Housing Ministries categorization, there are 2,560 ‘poor’ families in Malé. 4,098 families are lower-middle income households. In addition to the 5,634 families in the middle income category, 4,780 families are in the ‘wealthy’ category.