The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana was once a promising decentralised scheme expected to solve India’s ‘housing shortage’, but since a majority of the urban slum households did not own land, they were automatically excluded from availing its benefits.
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This is not the first time that a housing project is being implemented by the central government. Similar attempts were made by past governments as well. From Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) launched in 1990 to Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) in 2009 and a host of different housing schemes in between this period, attempts were made by successive governments to improve basic services, provide tenure security, upgrade existing infrastructure and create new housing units with a vision of creating a ‘Slum Free India’.
Although similar in vision, the PMAY(U) adopted a much more decentralised system in financing the construction and development of housing. This generated a hope that the PMAY(U) would overcome the challenges of previous schemes and would introduce new ways of providing ‘affordable houses’.
However, data depicts that PMAY(U) has performed sluggishly across the four years of implementation. It has failed to take practical challenges into account. As a YUVAand IHF report ‘Housing Needs of the Urban Poor in Nagpur‘ discovered, ‘there is a glaring gap between people’s aspirations, their capabilities and state imagination of housing provision’. Therefore, there is a mismatch between the people’s needs and what the housing mission has to offer.
The other issue is that in spite of the availability of flexible and low-interest housing loans, people are not coming forward for housing projects due to the high costs of land, particularly in urban areas.
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