Government races to meet rural housing target
Nearly half a million houses for the landless poor, stuck over land unavailability, are likely to be completed by May as the government rushes to achieve its target before the general election. Out of the 460,000 houses under the government’s flagship rural housing scheme, 240,000 are in Bihar and 30,000 in Tamil Nadu. Media had reported earlier that the Centre had written to the states about a large number of landless poor not being sanctioned houses because of land availability. “Allocation of land has now been completed in most states. I expect that most of the remaining cases in Bihar and Tamil Nadu should be sanctioned by February 10,” said an official aware of the development. The government had aimed to complete 10 million houses in the first phase under the Pradhan MantriAwasYojana-Gramin (PMAY-G), the rural component of the scheme, by the end of the current fiscal. So far, about 6.7 million houses have been completed and 1.7 million are in the final stages of construction. The government is confident that 9.7 million houses will be ready by March 31 and the rest by the end of May, according to a senior government official, who did not want to be identified.
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