MOSCOW. Sept 26 (Interfax-AVN) - Under the draft budget for 2004, only about 50 percent of the 9,000 career servicemen who will retire from the armed forces next year will get state housing certificates, a source in the Defense Ministry told Interfax-Military News Agency on Friday.
"About 9,000 servicemen will quit the army next year, and the absolute majority of them do not have permanent housing or live in restricted-access military compounds and need to leave. At the same time, the budget for 2004 allocates only RUB1.3bn (USD42.55m) for housing provision in the framework of the state housing certificate program, which will be enough for 4,500 servicemen," the source said.
"No conclusions have been drawn from the experience of the past few years," he noted.
"The state program of issuing state housing certificates was chronically underfunded in the past few years, though it is well known that the housing problem is the most acute for the law- enforcement agencies," the source went on.
As the prices of land plots allocated for housing construction are rising each year, the total volume of housing handed over to servicemen has been declining steadily.
"The number of servicemen and retired servicemen who need housing is growing unstoppably and currently exceeds 160,000. In fact, over 30 percent of Russian officers need housing," the source said.