Page 64 - Shelter, October 2024

POLICY REVIEW
smart buildings and resilient
housing.
In essence, it seems that
the PMAY-U scheme has
benefitted middle- and high-
income group people more
than the urban poor. On a
positive note, the PMAY-U 2.0
envisages certain changes to
make the program inclusive
(The Times of India, 2024).
Under the CLSS scheme,
the households with annual
income up to 9 lakh are
eligible for interest subsidy
for dwelling units of up to 120
sqm. carpet area. Households
opting for a house costing
maximum Rs 35 lakh can
avail loan up to Rs 25 lakh
although the 4% interest
subsidy is provided only for
Rs 8 lakh loan amount over a
repayment period of 12 years.
Under the Beneficiary Led
Construction (BLC) vertical,
the financial assistance for Budgetary Allocations for
the EWS group (with annual Urban Basic Services and
income less than Rs. 3 lakh) Urban Transport
is increased from Rs.1.5 lakh
to Rs. 2.5 lakh per house.
The other important vertical
– ISSR is subsumed within
the AHP vertical with higher
financial assistance of Rs. 2.5
lakh per house as compared
to the previous provision of
Rs. 1 lakh per house. Credit
Risk Guarantee Trust Fund
(CRGFT) offers credit risk
guarantee to the urban poor
taking housing loans from the
PLIs. Recent increase in the
CRGFT’s corpus from Rs 1000
62 HUDCO-HSMI Publication
crore to Rs 3000 crore would households lack access to
ease the processing of housing bathroom and latrine facilities
loans for the urban poor. Strict respectively (NSSO, 2019).
adherence to these revised Inadequate access to basic
norms could ensure greater services affects every part
incidence of benefits reaching of people’s lives – greater
the ‘deserving’ beneficiaries the service deficits, higher
and help them to manage the is the negative impact on
increasing costs of housing productivity and prosperity
construction. This must be of people.
backed up by regulatory
measures to control housing Among the different
prices, especially targeted for government programs for
the EWS/LIG households. In addressing service deficits, the
this context, the digitalisation proposed outlay for AMRUT
of land records with GIS scheme has registered an
mapping, if implemented increase of about 54 percent
properly, would ease the from the revised estimate of
administrative difficulties in INR 5200 crores in 2023-24 to
providing land titles to the INR 8000 crores for 500 cities.
poor. Proper urban planning In case of Swachh Bharat
coupled with reforms in land Mission (Urban), the current
development regulations, budget has proposed Rs 5000
as envisaged in the Budget, crores as compared to the
would also facilitate adequate revised allocation of Rs 2550
supply of urban land for
housing. crores in 2023-24 (Table 1).
On the other hand, the outlay
for the Smart Cities Mission
has decreased from revised
estimate of INR 8000 crores
in 2023-24 to budget estimate
Cities in India continue to of INR 2400 crores in 2024-25
experience significant urban
(also same in interim budget
service deficits. The NSSO 2024 as the scheme’s tenure is
(2019) report shows that over).Notably, two budgetary
almost one-fifth of households heads namely City Investment
in urban India lack access
to water within their homes to Innovate Integrate and
Sustain 2.0 (CITIS 2.0) and
and 6 percent of them collect National Urban Digital
water from sources situated
more than 200 meters away Mission (NUDM) – erstwhile
from their homes. In case of component of SCM – have
sanitation, about 16 percent received separate allocations
of the urban households rely of Rs 225 crore and Rs 1450
on shared facilities while 8 crore respectively. The
percent and 4 percent urban Budget has also proposed