Gulf | Qatar
New Qatari city to house thousands of expats
Six workers will share a room in four-storey buildings in Dh4b project.
- Gulf News Report
- Published: 00:47 March 3, 2008
Doha: Qatar will build a workers city housing 50,000 labourers on the outskirts of Doha by 2010, a local daily said yesterday.
The R4 billion riyal (about Dh4 billion) project will have residential buildings, mosques, playgrounds, fitness centre, cinemas, malls, motel and medical centre, said the English daily Gulf Times.
Quoting officials at Barwa, the project's developer, the daily said Al Baraha City will be located in the Industrial Area and will be built on 1.8 million square metres, out of which some 754,000 square metres will be reserved for the built up area and 250,000 square metres will be devoted to landscaping and recreation.
Sports facilities
Bowling alleys, snooker halls, and a cricket pitch will form a part of the sports facilities.
The 64 residential buildings will have only four floors, and each room will accommodate a maximum of six people, so that one person would have 4.25 square metres of living space.
"Labourers are an essential part of [construction sector in] this country ... our leadership has given us clear instructions to provide quality housing to labourers, which has very few parallels in the world," Ebrahim Yousuf Fakhro, Barwa Al Baraha chief executive officer, was reported as saying.
"Labourers' rights and improvement of their living and health standards is our main objective behind the project," said Ganem Bin Sa'ad Al Sa'ad, chairman of Barwa Real Estate Company. The construction of the workers' city comes at a time when the country is facing a shortage of accommodation, due to the demographic boom and the growing demand for residential properties.
Qatar sits on the world's third largest gas reserves and is witnessing an unprecedented development of its industrial and civil infrastructure supported by oil and gas revenues.
Manpower
The country's development has attracted foreign companies and expatriate manpower leading to a population boom estimated at 1.5 million.
But local contractors have often come under fire by human rights groups for exploiting foreign labourers and obliging them to live in poor conditions. Human rights watchdogs have also blamed authorities for ignoring the suffering of thousands of workers, whose stories of neglect and harassment often appear in the local papers.
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