By Patrick Denny
Stabroek News
June 20, 2001

The Ministry of Housing & Water will be temporarily relocated to the Guyana Natural Resources Agency building on Brickdam and a temporary freeze is being effected on houselot interviews, allocations and payments.

Housing Minister, Shaik Baksh yesterday confirmed that this freeze is temporary and should last a month. A notice to this effect will be posted in the daily newspapers.

Meanwhile, 64 employees of the ministry have been sent on their annual leave as the ministry attempts to streamline operations in the wake of last Friday's fire which gutted its Homestretch Avenue location. Sixty others will be relocating with the ministry's temporary offices at the GNRA building on Brickdam starting today.

Efforts, Baksh said, are currently underway to reconstruct data for the housing programme. He indicated that a task force has begun to reconstruct data based on that which is available on disks up to March of this year. Officers, he indicated, would be fanning out into housing areas to verify the information contained on the disks.

He assured that the data available would yield an accurate picture of what obtained before the fire which gutted the ministry building. A substantial amount of data on the housing programme was saved in a small building adjacent to the ministry where interviews were conducted for house lot allocations.

Baksh said that the squatters regularisation programme would be set back as a result of the fire but the infrastructure projects would continue. He indicated that the Inter-American Development Bank US$30 million project will commence in August with 14 schemes getting basic infrastructure.

He added that the public consultation on the Greater Georgetown Development Plan would also go ahead in July.

The ministry's staffers were yesterday working out of the canteen at the gutted premises and in the spared building. (Oscar P. Clarke)