The Devendra Fadnavis government planned to build 6.64 lakh houses under the PMAY scheme but only 86,320 are complete or under construction; government hopes to clear backlog through PPP model scheme.
Mumbai: The BJP-led Maharashtra government is scrambling to meet ambitious targets that it had set for itself under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet ‘housing-for-all’ scheme. So far, the government has only been able to start or complete work on about 13 per cent of the 6.64 lakh houses, it had promised in urban Maharashtra under the ‘Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana’ (PMAY).
The figures are from the state housing department. The government had promised to build the houses by March 2019, before the Lok Sabha and state assembly polls next year.
The government’s achievement under the scheme so far is also a far cry from the final target of constructing 19.4 lakh low-cost houses before 2022, which the Fadnavis government set for urban areas in the state.
So far, the number of houses that beneficiaries have actually occupied is 40,599, while construction of 44,727 more is underway, as per information from the state housing department.
The Maharashtra government formally adopted the Centre’s PMAY programme in December 2015, initially to be implemented in 51 cities across the state and gradually to be extended to cover nearly all of urban Maharashtra. Under PMAY, the Union government provides funding of Rs 1.5 lakh for every tenement created under the scheme, while the state government tops it up with another Rs 1 lakh.
An official from the state housing department, who did not wish to be named, said, “The immediate focus is to meet targets under the scheme for 2019. The numbers are likely to pick up now with the newly-adopted public private partnership model of constructing tenements under the scheme.”
State pins hope on PPP model
Government officials have pinned their hopes on creating a stock of affordable houses through a public private partnership (PPP) model that the state government adopted under PMAY earlier this year. Through this approach, the government hopes to create low-cost houses on government as well as private land with the help of real estate developers, where at least 50 per cent of the tenements constructed are to be available as affordable housing.
To promote interest among private developers, the state government has also decided to tweak the pricing methodology of houses built in this model. Earlier, the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) was to determine the cost of 50 per cent of the houses created in such projects, to ensure that their price remained affordable. The government, however, has now decided to determine the cost of these houses based on the state’s ready reckoner rate or the developer’s rate, whichever is lower.
A MHADA official said, “The thought process is that pricing them as per the ready reckoner will be easier as MHADA’s pricing policy includes items such as land cost that makes the exercise complicated, considering these projects are on a PPP model. The houses will still remain affordable as the government can control the ready reckoner prices.”
The state government recently approved eight such PPP projects, six of which are in the Pune Metropolitan Region, to build over 21,000 houses. About 13,500 of these are proposed to be created through a single project at Chakan in Pune district.
Until early this year, the state government was implementing the PMAY scheme through four approaches that the Centre charted out – slum redevelopment on the existing plot, creating of housing stock by public authorities, beneficiary-led individual housing and a credit-linked interest subsidy scheme.
“We are also assessing how many tenements we can create through some of the government’s major redevelopment projects such as the Dharavi redevelopment and the revamp of the Bombay Development Directorate chawls so that we can consider these too as part of our achievements under PMAY,” a housing department official said.
State faring better on paper
Officials say that though the number of houses built under the scheme is small, the government is doing better in terms of the number of houses approved on paper.
In the roughly two-and-a-half years that the scheme has been active in the state, the government has got 3.08 lakh houses sanctioned as of May 2018. This, however, is still just about 50 per cent of the target until 2019, with less than a year in hand to reach the 6.64 lakh figure.
Of the total target of 19.4 lakh houses, the government intended to build 1.94 lakh houses by March 2018. It is hoping to construct another 4.7 lakh houses by March 2019, and 6.38 lakh each in 2019-20 and 2020-21, as per officials from the state housing department.