‘Over 80% PMAY-G beneficiaries spent more than allocated amount’

New Delhi: More than 80 per cent of Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin beneficiaries spent over Rs 1.50 lakh to construct houses under the scheme, higher than the allocated Rs 1.20 lakh for rural areas in plains and Rs 1.30 lakh in hills, according to surveys done in 2022.

Conducted by National Level Monitoring (NLM) agents in three phases, the surveys took responses of around 15,000 beneficiaries of the scheme across the country, and the findings were released in three reports.

The Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) aims at providing a ‘pucca’ house to people living in rural areas who don’t have one. The unit assistance provided under the scheme is Rs 1.20 lakh in the plains and Rs 1.30 lakh in hilly and difficult areas as well as Integrated Action Plan (IAP) districts.

It was done in three phases in January, May and August-September of 2022. In the first phase, 4,051 PMAY-G beneficiaries in 85 districts of 10 states were surveyed, in the second phase, 5,281 beneficiaries in 111 districts in 25 states and in the third phase, 5,700 beneficiaries in 110 districts of 24 states.

In the survey’s first phase, 15 per cent of respondents said they had spent up to Rs 1.50 lakh to construct their houses, in the second phase it was 19 per cent and in the third phase it was 16 per cent, the reports showed.

Thirty-four per cent respondents in the first phase of the study reported spending between Rs 1.50 lakh and Rs 2 lakh on construction of their houses. The figures for the second and third phases were 38 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively, according to data in the reports.

Data showed that around 16 per cent of beneficiaries in the first phase, 15 per cent in the second phase and 22 per cent in the third phase of the survey stated that they had spent between Rs 2 lakh and 2.5 lakh to construct their houses.

The reports also pointed out discrepancies in ‘AwaasSoft’, a web-based platform to facilitate e-governance in the PMAY-G. There were 184 cases across the country where the completion status online did not match with AwaasSoft, according to the reports.