Housing for Disabled Scheduled To Open in April

A new $2-million housing complex being built for 240 families of people with disabilities is to be up and running in April, a government official said Wednesday.

Kvan Seam, director of engineering at the Ministry for Defense, said work was underway to build infra­struc­ture for the families on a 460-hec­tare social land concession at a loca­tion skirting the boundaries of Kam­pot, Koh Kong and Kompong Speu provinces that had recently been cleared of unexploded ordnance.

The complex, called Center 317, is a pilot project, and will not, as incorrectly reported Tuesday, be in Kompong Cham’s Memot district.

Prime Minister Hun Sen said he was canceling a planned World Bank-funded housing project in Memot district Tuesday, because it was taking too long to materialize. The World Bank declined to comment Wednesday.

Cham Ropha, a planning official with the Cambodian Mine Action Authority, said that it was important that the Cambodian government give money to such projects, as foreign aid was often too slow arriving.

“We have not had such a strong commitment [from the government] on this issue before,” he said.

Kvan Seam said the families who are to move to Center 317 are currently living in a center in Kandal’s Ken Svay district and are relying on government pensions alone.

At the new location, each family will be given a 26 square-meter plot for a house with 1.5 hectares on which to cultivate rice, he said. Land would also be put aside for schools, hospitals, pagodas and mar­kets.

Work is underway on a road to the area where the families would be housed, he said, adding that when this pilot project was completed the government would consider further projects.

SRP lawmaker Yim Sovann said that while he welcomed the project, he feared that the area in which the new center was to be built was too isolated.

“An area too far away from centers of population would not be ap­propriate,” Yim Sovann said.

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