Advocacy & Government: Only 5.4 percent of houses sanctioned in financial year 2020-21 under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin scheme (PMAY-G) have been built this year, the Ministry of Rural Development recently told a Parliamentary Standing Committee.
Launched in April 2016, the PMAY-G aims to provide a pucca (solid/permanent) house with basic amenities to all homeless rural families, or those living in kutcha (where the walls or roof are made of materials like un- burnt bricks, bamboos, mud, grass etc) houses, by the end of March 2022. So far, the Centre’s flagship rural housing scheme has completed 55 percent of its construction target, although money has been sanctioned for almost 85 percent of beneficiaries.
Of the 2.28 crore houses to be built, less than 1.27 crore had been completed by January 28, 2021, according to the Committee’s report presented to the Lok Sabha earlier this month. Another 61 lakh houses are under construction, as per the report.
It takes an average of 114 days to construct a house under the scheme.
States such as Odisha and Jharkhand had performed better than the national average and had used the scheme to provide employment opportunities to migrant workers returning to their villages during the COVID-19-induced lockdown.
While Odisha completed construction of 10.5 percent of its 2020-21 target and commenced work on 85 percent of houses for which money had been sanctioned this year, Jharkhand completed 7.25 percent of its target and had started work on more than 91 percent of houses sanctioned this year, said the ministry in its report to the panel.
States such as Assam, Chhattisgarh, and Karnataka however failed to complete the construction of even a single house sanctioned during the same period.
Read this article on what the low-income housing landscape looks like, and how it can improve.