Call For Expanding Ashiana Housing Schemes Allover Pakistan

LAHORE, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23th August, 2016) : The government should extend the scope of housing sector's projects like Ashiana Housing Schemes in all parts of Pakistan, besides ensuring provision of free of cost land to people, who could not buy land to construct their own houses. The government should also introduce housing finance schemes easily accessible to lower middle and the poor strata of the society, since there was hardly any loan option available for lower middle-class or people with monthly income ranging between Rs 10,000 and Rs 25,000, the CEO of Pakistan Furniture Council and ChenOne Builders Mian Kashif Ashfaq expressed these views in a meeting with builders and investors delegation here Tuesday. He said that like other South Asian countries, Pakistan is facing with huge shortage of houses due to ever increasing population growth, which needed concrete and corrective measures on emergent basis otherwise this shortfall is expected to swell up to 20 million residential units by the end of 2025. In order to cope with this challenge, he said that Pakistan needed to ensure construction of one million new residential units in the housing sector every year but currently, the country's pace on this count was as low as 150,000 to 200,000 new houses per annum. He cited that India started ambitious plan to build 20 million housing units at a cost of USD two trillion in next seven years, however, a lot had yet to be done in Pakistan to tackle effectively this issue of important nature.

According to World Bank's report, housing-finance-to-GDP ratio in Pakistan was just one percent and seven percent in India, whereas 50 percent in developed world, he mentioned. He underscored that Pakistan must have to conduct as early as possible a latest and accurate population census and number of households to determine the exact number of housing shortage we face right now. "The current population of Pakistan is about 200 million and expected to reach 240 million by 2025.

With construction of less than 0.2 million houses every year, we are facing a deficit of 0.6 million. If things will go on with the same pace, our total shortage of houses is expected to reach 20 million by year 2025," he apprehended. He also called upon the builders and investors to play their due role in ensuring maximum investment in real estate sector.

He mentioned that ChenOne Builders had finalized a plan to inject Rs 38 billion in housing sector by constructing 2,350 houses and apartments having five-star amenities at Islamabad, Lahore and Faisalabad.