Railway Family Payouts Could Be Increased
The government and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will start drafting a new resettlement plan this month that could improve the compensation on offer for some of the roughly 200 Phnom Penh families losing their homes because of rehabilitation of the country’s railway network in Pur Senchey district. Housing rights groups have been complaining for years that the compensations on offer for the roughly 4,000 families being evicted for the railway project nationwide has been well below the market rates for the land they occupy. … On Friday, however, the ADB also released a legal opinion that the families at Pur Senchey site do not actually own their plots because they are living on state public land, a decision that will cost some of the families a better compensation deal.
