Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Gramin

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Gramin (PMAY-G) or Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana (PMGAY) has been launched after subsuming the existing Indira Awas Yojana into it. This scheme is being implemented by Ministry of Rural Development.

Background

Rural housing program, as an independent programme, started with Indira Awaas Yojana (lAY) in January, 1996. Although lAY addressed the housing needs, certain gaps were identified Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in 2014. Some of these gaps included non-assessment of housing shortage, lack of transparency in selection of beneficiaries, low quality of houses, lack of technical supervision, lack of convergence, loans not availed by beneficiaries and weak mechanism for monitoring, were limiting the impact and outcomes of

the programme. The IAY was subsumed in the new rural housing programme because of these reasons.

The scheme was announced in March 2016 as a part of Housing for All by 2022 mission.

Salient Features

• PMAY-G aims at providing a pucca house, with basic amenities, to all houseless households and those households living in kutcha and dilapidated house, by 2022. The immediate objective is to cover 1 crore households living in kutcha house/dilapidated houses in three years from 2016-17 to 2018-19.
• The minimum size of the house is to be 25sqm (raised from 20m²) with a hygienic cooking space.
• The unit assistance under the scheme is Rs. 1.20 Lakh (raised from Rs. 70,000) for plains and Rs. 1.30 Lakh (raised from Rs.75000) in hilly, difficult areas and IAP districts.
• The beneficiary is also entitled to 90/ 95 persondays of unskilled labour from MGNREGS.
• The assistance for construction of toilet; piped drinking water, electricity connection, LPG gas connection etc. are also provided in convergence with other schemes.

Fund Sharing

The cost of unit assistance in this scheme is shared between Central and State Governments in the ratio 60:40 in plain areas and 90: 10 for North Eastern and Himalayan States.

Selection of Beneficiaries

One of the most important features of PMAYG is the selection of beneficiary. To ensure that assistance is targeted at those who are genuinely deprived and that the selection is objective and verifiable, PMAY-G instead of selecting a beneficiary from among the BPL households, selects beneficiaries using housing deprivation parameters in the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), 2011 data which is to be verified by the Gram Sabhas. The SECC data captures specific deprivation related to housing among households. Using the data households that are house less and living in 0, 1 and 2 kutcha wall and kutcha roof houses can be segregated and targeted. The Permanent Wait List so generated also ensures that the states have ready list of households to be covered under the scheme in the coming years (through Annual Select Lists) leading to better planning of implementation. To address grievances in beneficiary selection an appellate process has also been put in place.

National Technical Support Agency (NTSA)

Towards better quality of construction, setting up of a National Technical Support Agency (NTSA) at the national level is envisaged. One of the major constraints in quality house construction is lack of sufficient number of skilled masons. To address this, a pan India training and certification programme of masons has been launched in the States/ UTs. This will, in addition to ensuring quality construction, also ensure additional live lihood generation and career progression for rural masons. For timely construction/ completion and to ensure good quality of house construction, it has also been envisaged to tag a PMAY-G beneficiary with a field level Government functionary and a rural mason.

Use of E-Governance – AwaasSoft and AwaasApp

Implementation of this scheme is carried out through an end to end e-Governance model – using AwaasSoft and AwaasApp. While AwaasSoft is a work-flow enabled, web-based electronic service delivery platform through which all critical fun ctions of PMAY-G, right from identification of beneficiary to providing construction linked assistance (through PFMS), will be carried out; AwaasApp – a mobile application is to be used to monitor real time, evidence based progress of house construction through date and time stamped and geo-referenced photographs of the house. The two IT applications help identify the slipups in achievement of targets during the course of implementation of the program. All payments to beneficiaries is to be through DBT to beneficiary’s Bank/Post office accounts registered in AwaasSoft MIS.