india

Updated: Sep 03, 2019 02:40 IST

Madhya Pradesh government has surrendered roughly 25% of its quota under the Centre’s flagship Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) and expressed its inability to build as many as 232,000 houses for the rural poor under the scheme.

The Congress-ruled state conveyed its decision in this regard in a letter written to the Union rural development ministry in July. The decision comes months after the Narendra Modi government expanded the scheme in February to ensure that no rural poor remain homeless in the next three years.

The Centre annually decides a quota on how many houses a state should build based on the number of poor people left out of the scheme. It had allotted 832,100 houses under the scheme this year for Madhya Pradesh, which is the second-largest state in terms of area.

The state, which had announced a loan waiver package for farmers, has agreed to build 600,000 houses and surrendered another 233,000, or roughly 25% of the quota. “For the financial year 2019-20, a target of 8.32 lakh houses have been allotted. Now it has been decided that the state government will currently work with to achieve the target of 6 lakhs for the FY 2019-20. So, the remaining target of 2.33 lakhs against target communicated by Government of India is being surrendered,” Madhya Pradesh’s development commissioner, Gauri Singh, said in the letter to the Union rural development ministry.

Singh also assured that the state will work “with similar zeal and enthusiasm as it worked for phase 1 [of PMAY].”

HT learns that while it is not unknown for states to state their inability to meet targets, the quantum rarely exceeds a few thousands, and the admission usually comes later in the year.

Singh said the state’s share of 832,000 houses had become too large. “Therefore, looking at the financial constraints and allocation of budgetary support, it was decided to keep the target at a slightly higher level than last year. Last year, the target was 560,000. This year, the target is 600,000,” Singh told HT.

The PMAY has been one of the most popular welfare programmes along with Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana under which free LPG connections are provided to poor households.

The schemes have been widely seen to have contributed to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s return to power at the Centre.

Former rural development secretary Jugal Kishore Mahapatra said, in his tenure, he never came across such an incident of a state surrendering almost 25% of its quota. “I am aware that the MP government had its own scheme to build houses. But it is unwarranted that a state refused to absorb the entire quota and thereby deprive poor people from getting houses... there is always a waiting list for houses,” he said.