Minister Ali gives assurance of efficient, reliable services
MINISTER of Housing and Water Mr. Irfaan Ali said, on Wednesday, that his ministry will continue to focus on the delivery of efficient and reliable services to every Guyanese citizen. Speaking  at a media briefing in the boardroom of the Ministry, in Brickdam, Georgetown, he said: “We are not in the business of propaganda and wasting time at the Ministry of Housing. We are focused on delivering, to the people, service that they deserve.”
In that context, he said road rehabilitation works are progressing in many developing housing schemes across the country, to directly benefit the residents in those areas.
Ali said such projects, underway at Tuschen, East Bank Essequibo and Diamond, East Bank Demerara, are at least 50 per cent complete. At Tuschen, the contractor is in the process of changing the road to a double bituminous surface.
“We are upgrading a number of these roads into final asphaltic surfaces.”
In addition, he said, at Diamond, several community thoroughfares will be completed within the project time of three months.
“This road construction will benefit 1,450 households or approximately 6,000 individuals and we are doing the same in Parfait Harmonie (West Bank Demerara) and Sophia (Greater Georgetown),” Ali reported.
Alluding to the development of new lots in many areas, he said mobilisation is also continuing at Leonora, West Coast Demerara,  to develop approximately 280 lots and at Recht Door Zee and Bell Vue, also in Region Three (Essequibo Islands/West Demerara), where about 700 lots will be ready by the end of May.
“In Eccles, too, we are working, aggressively, on the first phase of the East Bank Demerara expansion and we are hoping that, by the end of April, we will have nearly 1,000 lots ready in that area,” Ali disclosed.
According to him, the designs to further develop another scheme at Herstelling have been done and work will commence, very shortly, under the  second phase of the Government of Guyana funded East Bank Demerara Development Programme.
He said, when the work at Herstelling would have been completed, some
1,000 lots become available, making a total of 2,000 lots through Government investment.
Ali lauded the efforts of those private institutions which have been critically involved in the housing drive, noting the persons concerned in the new schemes have all responded to a public process of advertisement.
“They were allocated plots of land, solely for the purposes of housing development and those developers have commenced work and are doing so aggressively, especially on the East Bank Demerara where the land is rapidly being transformed from cane fields and made ready for the infrastructural development,” he explained.
Ali gave the assurances that all of those projects will be implemented in a transparent manner, so that accountability is not sacrificed or compromised in any way.