NDA built 12.5 mn homes for poor in 4 years: Modi
The average time for constructing a house under PMAY too has come down from 18 months under the UPA rule to less than a year now, according to Modi
SHIRDI(AHMEDNAGAR): Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that in four years, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government had constructed 12.5 million homes for the poor, compared to 2.5 million built by the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in the same period.
Addressing an event in the holy town of Shirdi in Maharashtra, and effectively launching his party’s campaign for next year’s parliamentary polls in the state, the prime minister said that the United Progressive Alliance would have taken 20 years to build the same number of houses (12.5 million )
“They (the Congress) cannot match the quality and the speed with which the schemes by us are being implemented,”modi said, repeating his government’s commitment to provide a home to every poor person in the country by 2022, when India will celebrate 75 years of Independence.
The prime minister also said that the average time for construction of a home has come down from 18 months during the UPA’S rule to less than a year now. He added that the National Democratic Alliance government gives ~1.2 lakh to a poor household for building a home as compared to ~70,000 offered by the previous government.
“People and resources are the same, but since our government has a clean intention of welfare of the poor, the results are also faster,” he said, while accusing the Congress of starting its own schemes for “vote-bank” politics. “They (the Congress) worked for giving publicity to one family whereas we work for poverty elimination,” the prime minister said.
“Their schemes lacked sincerity and hence the houses built by the previous government had no electricity, toilets, water supply and gas connection.”
The NDA government renamed the Indira Awas Yojana started in 1996 as the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana in April 2016 and added features such as institutional finance at lower interest rates and more money for building a bigger home with water and power connections.
Maharashtra Congress chief Ashok Chavan accused the PM Modi of misleading the nation. “Between 2003 and 2013, the UPA government had constructed 22.4 million houses under Indira Awas Yojana,” said Chavan. “It means the UPA government managed to construct 25 lakh houses every year,” he said. Housing activist Ramesh Prabhu said : “This Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) is a good scheme but the implementation is very poor”.
He wondered whether the government’s ambitious target of housing for all by 2022 could be met. In Shirdi, Modi was participating at an event organised to hand over possession of 250,000 houses built under the scheme.
He also launched welfare schemes worth ~450 crore announced by Shri Shirdi Saibaba Trust on the occasion of the culmination of the centenary year of the Sai Baba’s Mahasamadhi.
He also interacted with the beneficiaries of PMAY in various districts of Maharashtra through video conferencing.