Just 4% houses built this fiscal yr in PM’S rural housing plan
NEW DELHI: About four out of every 100 houses targeted to be built this financial year under the Centre’s flagship rural housing scheme have been completed so far, according to government data. The lag is due to the Covid-19 lockdown, financial constraints and other issues, officials said.
The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna-grameen, or PMAY-G, was created to provide pucca house to every homeless poor in rural areas. While it has been consistent in chasing targets, this year, some large states have faltered.
A senior official aware of the matter pointed out that the scheme, rolled out in November 2016, “has already completed 2.02 crore houses. And we are confident that we will cross the target of building 3 crore houses by March 2022, well before the deadline of August 2022.”
A performance audit of the rural development ministry has flagged several issues, including the impact of Covid-19. HT has seen the audit report.
According to latest government data, while the Centre has set the annual target of building 6.377 million houses in FY20-21, states have sanctioned only 3.557 million, or 56% of the target. Of these, only 265,250 (or 4.16% of the year’s target) have been completed.
The slow place was flagged in the agenda paper of the ministry’s Performance Review Committee (PRC), which meets at regular intervals to take note of the progress and identify the bottlenecks in different projects.
A senior rural ministry official pointed out that states that have contributed 40% of the costs of each house have faced cash crunch as they had to redirect funding to fight the pandemic. “...some states are not in a position to release the funds for housing scheme. But the situation will improve.”
The states sanctioned just 56% of the targeted houses this year, a massive drop from FY19-20, when, against the Centre’s target of 5.976 million houses, the states sanctioned 5.966 million. The gap between targets and sanctions has widened from 440,000 in the previous financial year to 2.79 million in this one.
“The states of Chhattisgarh, Assam, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have huge gaps in pending sanctions, and need to expedite daily rate of sanctions to achieve the target,” said the report.
Expressing concerns, the report said, “The pace of completion has slowed down drastically. This slow pace can be attributed to some factors like inactivity due to Covid-19, elections in few states, saturation of eligible beneficiaries from the SC and ST category, slow pace of working of remand module and lack of timely allocation of targets to districts.”
The Centre’s performance audit, however, added that “while the lockdown due to Covid-19 was largely an unavoidable factor”, intense follow-ups are being done with the States/uts which are lagging behind.
While the ministry has asked states to beef up the completion rate of PMAY-G houses by March 31—a tough task by all measures—it has once again identified some big states that have pulled down the rate of completion to an abysmal low.
“West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Odisha need to expedite daily rate of completion to achieve the target,” it said.
MP minister Gopal Bhargava said the previous Congress government had “not made any provision for rural housing under PMAY in the budget for 2019-20” but the BJP government rectified it. “The MP government has set a target to provide housing to all by 2023 and we are sure of achieving it,” said Bhargava.
A senior Trinamool Congress leader said on condition of anonymity that in “West Bengal, projects in several districts got delayed last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic and cyclone Amphan.”