Delhi residents have not gotten any benefit from the Centre’s urban housing scheme due to the ego of a Chief Minister who does not want to implement a scheme in the name of the Prime Minister, Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on Friday.
Delhi is the only State which has not submitted any proposal under the urban section of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), a flagship central scheme promising housing for all by 2022. Earlier this week, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal launched the Mukhya Mantri Awas Yojana for residents of the city’s slum clusters and promised to provide them with pucca houses.
“He has prioritised his ego and the name of a scheme, and he has sacrificed the scheme for his ego... If development is going to be based on the nomenclature of a scheme, then you are depriving your own citizens,” said Mr. Puri.
Queries to the Delhi government about the State’s failure to implement the central scheme, and Mr. Puri’s allegations, were not answered.
Mr. Puri claimed that the AAP-led Delhi government’s decision to put on hold for more than a year a survey for in-situ slum rehabilitation under the PMAY was a classic example of “a political approach based on a pack of lies”. While the State had consented to the survey in January 2018 and accepted money to conduct the same in September, it never completed the survey, depriving the city’s slum-dwellers of benefits under the central scheme, said Mr. Puri. The Centre is now implementing slum rehabilitation through the centrally run Delhi Development Agency.
“If they had a conscience, they would have made at least a proposal,” he added.
PMAY (Urban) was launched in June 2015 and includes four verticals to develop urban housing, three of which require the State government to present proposals to the Centre. PMAY data shows that no such proposals have come from the State.
However, more than 16,000 people in the city have taken advantage of the fourth vertical, which is a credit-linked scheme whereby individuals directly apply for interest subvention on their housing loans without any State involvement. Also, PMAY has completed more than 50,000 homes in the city which were sanctioned under the earlier central scheme, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, with proposals coming from the previous Congress government in Delhi.
In total, the PMAY has crossed the one crore milestone in terms of houses sanctioned nationwide, as against a validated demand of 1.12 crore. However, only 32 lakh houses have actually been completed so far, with another 28 lakh having reached the grounding stage. The Centre expects to sanction the entire target next year and complete construction by 2022.
