What is the issue?
The government's housing scheme is far from reaching its goal due to many impeding factors.
What is PradhanMantriAwasYojana?
- It is central governments flagship scheme to provide housing for rural poor in India.
- A similar scheme for urban poor recently launched is the "Housing For All by 2022"
- PMAY plans to provide homes to 18 million households in urban India and nearly 30 million households in rural India.
- PMAY provides interest subsidy on a home loan and direct subsidy for individual house construction or enhancement.
What are the roadblocks in implementation?
- The technical Group’s report highlighted the problem of housing shortage (lack in number of houses to accommodate the population of an area).
- There is widespread scarcity of land in building new housing units.
- Property records - People in ancestral homes and slum dwellers are unlikely to have proper title documents which are required for availing the subsidy.
- Moreover land records are governed by the State’s revenue department, while housing is a separate agency.
- The existence of distorted rental market is another cause of concern.
- Reports showed that there were over 10 million vacant houses which are un/ under-utilised.
- Owners of these vacant houses prefer to leave their house vacant, rather than offer it on rent in the fear of losing their property to tenants.
What should be done?
- States need to simplify the process of updating property records making it easier for citizens to obtain legal documents to their land and property.
- Creditshould be provided to people to upgrade their congested houses to tackle the problem of land scarcity.
- Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) should be done to incentivisedevelopers to in-situ rehabilitate slums.
- Providing security of tenure— even a “no eviction guarantee" to individual households who don’t have legal titles thereby encouraging them to invest money and upgrade their shelter.
- States need to push through rental reforms that balance the interests of tenants with the protection of property owners’ rights.
Source: BusinessLine
