Housing affairs panel flags stalled schemes, underutilisation of funds

The unification authorities should non denote schemes before finalising their plan after due consultation with key stakeholders, and once decided, their implementation should not be delayed, the Standing Committee on Housing and Urban Affairs said in its report presented in Parliament on Wednesday. Stating examples of the Urban Challenge Fund and the industrial housing scheme, announced by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech in February, the committee found that these were yet to be designed in consultation with stakeholders. To stress on this point, the committee noted: “The public bus transport scheme which was announced in the Budget of 2021-22 was approved by the Government of India on 16.08.2023 as PM-eBus sewa scheme and the funds under this scheme were for the first time actually spent during the financial year 2024-25.” Similarly, the National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM), which was announced as a new scheme in the July 2024 budget with a budgetary allocation of ₹1,150 crore for FY 2024-25, is to receive Cabinet approval and the funds allocated has remained unutilised, the panel’s report said.The findings were similar for the flagship urban housing scheme, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) or PMAY(U). The panel said that, as of February 14, the ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) spent only ₹4,568.40 crore compared to the revised estimate of ₹15,170 crore for the scheme. In this regard, the committee recommended that the ministry must closely monitor the completion of 2.14 million under-construction houses and intervene to ensure the grounding and completion of the remaining 366,000 houses. The committee sought to be briefed by the ministry over the progress made across states in three months. In total, the committee, headed by Telugu Desam Party MP Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy, and comprising 30 other members from the Lok Sabha (20) and Rajya Sabha (10), gave 14 recommendations to MoHUA, currently headed by former Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar. These recommendations aim to avoid the past experiences of underutilisation of funds and dissatisfactory outcomes for some flagship programmes.The panel also flagged data on the urban homeless population and the ministry’s practice of referring to the last-conducted census of 2011 in its plans and targets.“The committee, therefore, recommends that the ministry should conduct a fresh and comprehensive survey to ascertain the exact number of homeless individuals so that the objective of ‘Housing for all’ can be achieved through the revamped PMAY(U) 2.0,” it said.Another standing committee related to the department, then headed by Rajiv Ranjan Singh, in December 2023 flagged some shortcomings such as counting of houses built under the scheme even when the basic supporting infrastructure for those houses was missing. HT contacted the ministry for comments and was awaiting a response.