Steep climb ahead to complete Housing for All target by 2022: ICRA

NEW DELHI: Kapil Banga, Assistant Vice-President, ICRA (Investment Information and Credit Rating Agency of India Limited), said that Rs 4.97 lakh crore of funds are required, out of which Rs 2.97 lakh crore has been provided in the last five years but Rs 1.71 lakh crore has to be incurred in the next 1.5 years, in order to achieve the target of Housing for All (HFA) by 2022. He added that talking about expenditure in Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), Rs 25,000 crore was spent in 2020 while Rs 40,500 crore was for 2021. However, budgetary allocation for 2022 is only Rs 47,500 crore which means there is a gap of Rs 1.24 lakh crore to be filled in the next 1.5 years, he added.

PMAY was launched in 2015 under which the Government of India had set the target to construct 50 million new housing units by 2022, out of which, 30 million are proposed to be constructed in rural areas and the remaining 20 million in urban areas. The actual implementation, in the meantime, has fallen below the target and requires a major push to go forward. With 1.5 years remaining, 19.55 million houses have been sanctioned and 4.8 million houses are complete through PMAY-Rural till April 2021, according to Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA).

In case of PMAY-Urban, revised targets were of 11.2 million units and 4.8 million houses have been completed, leading to 43 per cent completion of near-term target, according to MoHUA. A significant pick up in pace of both PMAY-R and PMAY-U are required to achieve the target by 2022. The performance is affected in 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic as the funds have been reduced to Rs 8000 crore against the revised estimate of Rs 21,000 crore.