'Liberal norms needed to meet shortage of 18.78 mlln houses'

"Unless liberal norms with greater Floor Area Ratio (FAR) and population density norms are adopted, we will not able to fulfil this gap," Maken, who is the Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, said.

The minister was speaking at the inaugural session of Acetech-2012, a conference of architecture, construction and Engineering consultants here.

Delineating the strategy to meet the target of 18.78 million houses in the country, Maken said his Ministry has already started implementing the strategy to achieve the objectives.

Since this shortage exist mostly in affordable housing sector, the government has announced the establishment of a credit risk guarantee fund trust with an initial corpus of Rs 1,000 crore for making available housing loan on easy terms.

With this, the people belonging to economically weaker sections and low income group will get loan up to Rs five lakh without any third party guarantee or collateral security.

He said as part of the strategy, government has also planned to pump in more money under the second phase of Rajiv Awas Yojana through states and municipalities.

"We are going to put Rs 45,000 crore and hope the states will also equally contribute, thereby making available Rs 90,000 crore during 12th Five Year Plan period for construction of houses," Maken said.

He also underlined the need for removal of artificial restrictions on housing and said if not removed, they will "kill" the housing industry.