Still More to do... To House its Citizens

The increasing urban population is leading to increase in housing shortage. The government has embarked on a mission to provide housing for all by 2022. Though a noble initiative, the mission lags momentum on account of scarcity of land, funding, long approval process, delay in land acquisition, disparity in home loans and other shortcomings. The government is making earnest efforts… Read to know how Affordable Housing is shaping up.

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India, though, is emerging as an economic powerhouse, vast majority of its citizen lives in dwellings in urban areas that are insufficient to house a family of four. Most of these dwellings are without electricity, bathrooms, toilets, sufficient sunlight, and water facilities. To provide a decent housing to its citizens the government in June 2015 announced its mission “Housing for All by 2022” to provide decent housing to its citizens which would have a brick and cement house with gas, water, electricity and a toilet. “Among the many flagship initiatives taken up during Modi 1.0, ‘Housing for All by 2022’ in real(i)ty was highly ambitious, far-fetched and yet quite noble in intent. In this regard, the government has actively tweaked policies and introduced schemes such as interest subsidies, given infrastructure status to ease fund availability and additional tax-benefit for both developers and homebuyers. The government is actively trying to attract private players participation. And, in a reversal of trends, realty developers are slowly but steadily catering to the affordable and low ticket segment, which has been long unserved and underserved owing to low margins. ANAROCK research also confirms the growing interest of developers as approximately 57,600 new units have been launched in the affordable category across the top 7 cities in H1 2019 – an increase of nearly 58% against the corresponding period in 2018,” says Anuj Puri, Chairman, ANAROCK Property Consultants. To promote affordable housing at an affordable price to the weaker sections of the society, lower-income group people, urban poor, and rural poor and to make it profitable for the private realty players to build and sell affordable housing, the government launched Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) - PMAY - Urban and PMAY - Gramin. “Affordable housing is one of the few sectors in India where demand currently far exceeds supply. The PMAY has contribute