Chief minister Mamata Banerjee ended more than a decade-long wait of people, who had lost their residences because of subsidence in coal belt, when she handed over documents of homes built by the state government to five beneficiaries at Raniganj in West Burdwan on Tuesday.

“Subsidence is a major problem in the coal belt that has rendered hundreds of people homeless here. This problem was never addressed earlier. Today, we started allotting homes to the people who had lost homes. It was a longstanding demand,” Mamata said during her West Burdwan administrative review meeting in Raniganj.

While handing over the papers to the five beneficiaries, Mamata asked West Burdwan district magistrate Purnendu Maji to finish construction of 12,000 dwellings by February next year in the first phase. The district administration has so far completed construction of 3,564 homes in Andal, Barabani and Jamuria blocks.

“People who lost their homes here have been waiting for a home for decades. We have to finish the work to provide them with houses by February. We have arranged Swastha Sathi cards for all, free ration for all and no,w we want to give free homes here,” she said.

The rehabilitation project was approved by the Centre in 2009 and a fund of Rs 2,629 crore was sanctioned in the same year following a Supreme Court directive. Former CPM MP and trade union leader Haradhan Roy had filed a PIL in the Supreme Court in 1997 demanding rehabilitation of those affected by subsidence. A master plan on rehabilitation was drawn up by the ECL following the instruction of the Supreme Court.

The homes are being constructed under the Centre-funded rehabilitation programme for the people living in the district’s subsidence-prone coal belts. Altogether 29,000 dwellings will be constructed on 400-acre land by the Bengal housing department and Asansol-Durgapur Development Authority where around 1.5-lakh people will be rehabilitated.

However, the project has hit a bottleneck with the Eastern Coalfield Limited (ECL) so far allowing construction only on 172 acres.

Sources said the ECL had raised objections to the constructions of home on the remaining land as it has coal reserve under it. Since the area is coal-bearing zone, no objection certificate from the ECL is required before carrying out any construction.

Local Trinamul leaders said the housing project would give the party an advantage to combat the BJP in the coal belt in next year’s Assembly elections and Trinamul would highlight the ECL’s “non-cooperation” in carrying out the project.

“The people here have elected BJP’s Babul Supriyo twice to Parliament but other than making false promises, he has done nothing to address the problem of the subsidence-affected population. It is Didi (Mamata) who did it. In our campaign against the BJP, we will definitely highlight it,” said Jitendra Kumar Tiwari, Asansol mayor and party president in West Burdwan.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP led in all seven Assembly seats in the coal belt. At present, Trinamul has five MLAs, while the CPM has two.

Rakesh Nunia, one of those who received papers for his house from the chief minister on Tuesday, thanked ‘Didi’ and said his more than a decade-long wait for a home was finally over. “We lost our home in 2011 following subsidence and have been staying in an abandoned ECL hospital building since then. We have been waiting for a permanent home for a decade. We are thankful to Didi,” he said.

At Tuesday’s event, Mamata also handed over a 75-acre plot to 1,572 people who had sold their land for setting up the Kazi Nazrul Islam Airport in Andal.