Centre plans Housing for All in time for LS polls

In the run-up to 2019 general elections, the Centre is working on early completion of “Housing for All” scheme.

Before the Parliament polls, the NDA government wants to showcase this project as an achievement, said an official in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.

In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Housing for All by 2022 scheme, with a target to construct 12 million houses for urban residents. The government now wants to complete it by 2020. In 2016, the PM also launched PMAY (Rural) with an aim to build 10.2 million houses in rural areas by March 2019. The government wants to complete the rural scheme by 2018 end.

Though the construction of houses was slow in 2016 and 2017 as states were busy with the preliminaries of project implementation, including land acquisition, the project execution phase has now picked up, said an official.

However, to meet the target the Centre will have to nudge the states, particularly Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and many others which are lagging behind.

So far, the houses completed as against the number sanctioned is just around 30%. The government expects the construction pace to pick up once monsoon season ends by September. The officials from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and Rural Development were in touch with the states to expedite the construction, said the official.