Giving a boost to affordable housing, the government on Thursday announced a new scheme to help “deserving” sections of the middle class buy or build their own houses.
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Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also gave a push to rural housing and said two crore more houses would be made under the flagship Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY)-Rural.
“Our government will launch a scheme to help deserving sections of the middle class living in rented houses or slums or chawls and unauthorised colonies to buy or build their own houses,” the Finance Minister said.
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Ms. Sitharaman said that despite the challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, “implementation of PMAY (Rural) continued and we are close to achieving the target of three crore houses”. “Two crore more houses will be taken up in the next five years to meet the requirement arising from increase in the number of families,” she added.
The PMAY is a credit-linked subsidy scheme to facilitate access to affordable housing for low and moderate-income people. It has two components — PMAY (Urban) for the urban poor under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and PMAY (Rural) for rural India under the Ministry of Rural Development.
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The total allocation to the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry for 2024-25 is ₹77,523 crore, up from ₹76,431 crore in 2023-24. The total allocation for PMAY is ₹80,671 crore out of which ₹54,500 crore is for PMAY (Rural).
Ms. Sitharaman said that PM-SVANidhi, a micro-credit scheme for street vendors being run by the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry, has provided credit assistance to 78 lakh street vendors, out of which 2.3 lakh have received credit for the third time.
The government was working with an approach to development that was all-round, all-pervasive and all-inclusive to make India a ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047, she added.