india

Updated: Aug 29, 2019 15:04 IST

The Madhya Pradesh government doesn’t want to build as many as 232,000 houses for the rural poor under the flagship Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) scheme and, in a rare move, has surrendered its quota to the Centre.

The state’s decision comes months after the Narendra Modi government expanded the scheme to ensure no rural poor remain homeless in the next three years.

Every year, the Centre decides a quota on how many houses a state should build, based on the number of poor people left out from the scheme. This year, the Centre had allotted 832,100 houses for Madhya Pradesh, the second largest state in terms of area.

But 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 FY 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 development commissioner Gauri Singh said in a letter to the additional secretary of the Union rural development ministry.

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

“The state’s share for 832,000 had become too large and 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 later said while speaking to HT.

The PMAY has been one of the most popular welfare programmes along with Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana that provides free LPG connection to women in vast rural belts. All these schemes, which ended up creating a new vote base of 22 crore people, were also politically significant for the ruling BJP.

Buoyed by the success of the first phase, the Centre had launched Phase 2 of the PMAY in February 2019, days before the Lok Sabha election schedule was declared. In PMAY, states (barring those in the northeast) pay for nearly 37% of the total expenditure. Under Phase 2, the total target for construction has been set at 1.95 crore house up to 2022.

“Gramin (PMAY-G) in Phase-ll till 2019-20 as per the existing norms of PMAY-G Phase-l, with a target of 60 lakh houses involving financial implication of Rs.76,500 crore (Centre’s share of Rs 48,195 crore and state share of Rs 28,305 crore),” a government release said in February.