With 'Lakhpati' Compliment for Poor before Polls, PM Presses Home UP’s 93% Housing Record in 5 Years

People have become ?lakhpatis? after getting houses under the PM Awas Yojana, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said twice in the last week. The message won’t be lost amid the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh where the Bharatiya Janata Party feels the housing scheme could be the game changer for it like the free cylinders programme PM Ujjwala Yojana was during the 2017 polls in the state.

Sample this: Uttar Pradesh leads in the country by completing 93% of its allocated target of building houses for the poor in the state. Out of the target of building a total of nearly 26 lakh houses, UP has already completed the construction of 24.3 lakh at the highest completion rate in the country of almost 93% as of date. The only state which comes close to this record is West Bengal at a nearly 82% completion rate though it has built more houses at nearly 31 lakh out of its target of 38 lakh.

What is significant for the BJP is that all the progress in Uttar Pradesh in this scheme was done under the Yogi Adityanath regime in the last five years as the Samajwadi Party government did not do any of it was focused on its own state programme, the Lohia Gramin Awas Yojana. Modi earlier said that Rs 18,000 crore sent to UP during the SP regime for the PM Awas Yojana remained unutilised. Uttar Pradesh has transferred over Rs 31,000 crore to date to beneficiaries as central and state share under the scheme. Each beneficiary gets nearly Rs 1.2 lakh to Rs 1.3 lakh for constructing a house.

The government, through a central and state share, provides funds to the beneficiaries under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) for constructing a house. The assistance is provided to the beneficiaries directly into their bank accounts through the Aadhaar-enabled Payment System (AePS) or Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) in construction-linked installments. At every fixed stage of construction of the house, the geo-referenced and time-stamped photograph of the structure along with the beneficiary is captured.

In order to achieve the target of “housing for all” in rural areas, the ministry of rural development is implementing the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana- Gramin (PMAY-G) with effect from April 1, 2016, to provide assistance to eligible rural households with an overall target to construct 2.95 crore pucca houses with basic amenities by March 2024.

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