Maharashtra government wants to expand ‘housing for all’ to cover all urban areas

Mumbai city news: The state will request the Centre to expand the scheme to 385 cities and towns in the state from 142

The BJP-led state government wants to expand the scope of the Centre’s flagship ‘housing for all’ scheme to cover urban Maharashtra entirely.

The Maharashtra government adopted the scheme, formulated as the ‘Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), in December 2015. (HT)

The state housing department is in the process of sending a proposal to the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, requesting it to expand the scheme to 385 cities and towns in the state. It is limited to 142 now.

An official said, “If the central government accepts our proposal, the scheme will cover all of urban Maharashtra, right from municipal corporations to councils to the nagar panchayats.”

Maharashtra has 27 municipal corporations, 234 municipal councils and 124 nagar panchayats.

The Maharashtra government adopted the scheme, formulated as the ‘Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), in December 2015. At that time, it was launched in just 51 cities and towns in the state.

“The number of towns in Maharashtra that can avail of the scheme were gradually increased to 91 in November 2016, and later to 142 earlier this year,” the official said.

The ‘housing for all mission’ is one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet projects. The Devendra Fadnavis-led Maharashtra government has set an ambitious target of constructing 19 lakh low-cost houses under the scheme by 2022. It has, however, been lagging behind, and has approved 45 projects so far that will yield 1,11,687 houses for the economically weaker sections. Forty three more such projects are under scrutiny.

The Union government provides Rs1.5 lakh for every tenement created under the scheme, while the state government funds another lakh.

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