(VOVworld) – More than 2,000 poor ethnic minority households in Tra Vinh province have benefited from a government support policy that allocates residential land, production land, houses, and water. The government support has enabled many disadvantaged ethnic people in the Mekong River Delta to escape poverty.
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| Kim Thi Sa Ren, for the first time in her life, has a certificate of land use right. |
Kim Thi Sa Ren is one of several poor residents of Hieu Tu village in Tieu Can district. She doesn’t own any residential or production land and her husband has been bedridden for about a decade. Ren’s family finds life extremely difficult and never has enough money to buy land and build a house. They have been staying on a neighbor’s land. In May, Ren’s family were overjoyed to be given 250 square meters of land to build a house.
80% of the 2,000 households who have received free residential land in Tra Vinh live in thatched huts. Thach Mai of Hieu Trung village who received land and enough money to build a house expressed feeling: “even when I got married, I never received a piece of land from my parents. I’m grateful to the government for giving me residential land. I’ll try harder now to escape poverty.”
Under the policy, each household receives more than 1,500 USD from central government and provincial budgets.
Son So Phon, head of the Ethnic Minority Affairs Section of Tieu Can district, said “the 1,500 USD per household is relatively little. But the support reflects the determination of the Steering Committee and local authorities and the involvement of social organizations who have persuaded land owners to help their fellow villagers. The policy shows that the Party and state care about ethnic minority people.”
To date, Tra Vinh has provided more than 728,000 square meters of land worth almost 3 million USD to some 2,000 landless households. Nearly one fifth of the households have been issued residential land use certificates.