Nearly three years into the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) for urban areas which promised “housing for all” by 2022, barely 8%, or 3 lakh of the 40.6 lakh houses targeted so far, have been constructed. The situation in the rural version of PMAY is better, but even there only 30%, or 28.8 lakh houses, have been completed against the 95.4 lakh targeted by the rural development ministry in 15 months since the plan was launched.This emerges from data on the websites of the urban affairs and rural development ministries. The data reveals that as on March 5 this year, the ministry had considered 8,341 projects under PMAY involving 40.6 lakh houses.But only 3.4 lakh houses have been completed, while work is in progress on 18 lakh or about 44% of the target. However, the data doesn’t reveal the stage of construction for these houses. Of those completed, about 3 lakh houses are occupied. PMAY (Urban) was launched by Modi on June 25, 2015, with the goal of building two crore houses for the poor in urban areas by 2022, coinciding with 75 years of independence.The 3 lakh houses completed so far under this scheme amount to just 2% of the seven-year target. The scheme provides central assistance to urban local bodies and other agencies through states and union territories for construction of houses under four different categories. Responding to TOI’s questions, the joint secretary and mission director, housing for all, in the urban housing ministry said, “Keeping in view that housing projects take 18-24 months to complete (in case of projects under two categories), we can expect that in the financial year 2018-19, the pace of PMAY (U) will pick up quite significantly.”PMAY (Gramin) was launched on November 20, 2016, and aimed to complete 1 crore new houses by March 31, 2019. Of these, 51 lakh houses were to be completed by end-March 2018. Thus, the 27.7 lakh actually completed are only about 54% of the target at this stage. Prasant Kumar, joint secretary (rural housing) with the rural development ministry, told TOI total 47 lakh houses under the PMAY (Gramin) would be completed by the end of March.He said that by March 20, the ministry has completed 28.8 lakh houses and expects to complete overall 51 lakh rural houses. “The normal question would be if 28 lakh houses were completed in 11.5 months, how would we fill the gap? Answer is very simple. Completions are very fast. Also there are uploading (figures on website) issues because of servers. But physically houses will be completed,” he said.Uttar Pradesh leads the nation in terms of rural housing targets with 61% completion followed by MP (44%) and Chhattisgarh (43%). At the other end of the spectrum, Telangana has not built any houses, according to the data. Nine states and six UTs have rates under 1%. Tamil Nadu, Assam and Gujarat are under 10% completion.