Government Comes Up With Another Progressive Approach For Effective Monitoring of PMAY-Urban

The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) as a flagship programme of the Modi-led government in the country has been functioning on a full-swing since 2015. The mission to provide houses for all is aimed to be completed by the year 2022. With the yojana carried out under two components as PMAY-Urban and PMAY-Rural, the latest announcement by the government highlights an additional feature to the Urban wing.

The government acknowledges the fact that for any strategy to enhance the provisioning of affordable housing in the country, its interventions through financial/non-financial support and policies play a critical role. Hence, the government set up a model on Public Private Partnership Policy (PPPP) for affordable housing in India. The policy tends to combine the strengths of private sector and public sector to overcome challenges such as access to land or cost of land and achieve the motive of building houses for the entire population. 

A dedicated unit to monitor PMAY-U 

With an objective to speed up the construction process and monitoring of PMAY more effectively, the government has recently announced to set up a dedicated unit. The Union housing and urban affairs ministry has also invited proposals from experienced consulting firm or agency who can provide an efficient workforce for the proposed unit.

The unit is termed as Programme Management Unit for PMAY and as per the RFP (Request For Proposal) by the ministry, the unit will provide focused support for the PMAY-U under Housing for All by 2022 Mission. 

An official stated, "The ministry has invited proposals from experienced consulting firm/agency for providing manpower for the establishment of Programme Management Unit for PMAY. The participating firm's average annual financial turnover of last three consecutive fiscal years must not be less than ₹ 9 crores".

The interested consulting firms/agencies have been asked to submit their proposals by October 17, and a pre-bid meeting will possibly take place on October 4. The proposed Programme Management Unit will be set up by April 2020 with operation till the year 2022.

The report of PMAY-Urban so far 

The target of setting one crore houses in the country's urban areas has so far achieved the completion of 26 lakh houses, and 81 lakh houses sanctioned for construction as per the report of June 2019.

Stating on the same, Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri said, "As against a target completion date of 2022, I am more or less confident that we can have all the sanctioning done by the first quarter of 2020 and more or less completion by the end of 2020".

Approval of overall investment of ₹ 5.54 lakh crore has been reported so far, out of which ₹ 3.01 lakh crore by the central and state governments and while ₹ 2.53 lakh crore as the private investment.

Some of the states have got the following number of approvals for construction under PMAY-U: 

• West Bengal - 27,746 houses

• Tamil Nadu - 26,709 houses

• Gujarat - 20,903 

• Punjab - 10,332

• Chhattisgarh - 10,079 

• Jharkhand - 8,674

• Madhya Pradesh - 8,314

• Karnataka - 5,021 

• Rajasthan - 2,822

• Uttarakhand - 2,501