BHUBANESWAR: After a series of protests by the Opposition over alleged irregularities in selection of beneficiaries under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), the State Government has initiated a process to weed out ineligible families who were wait-listed after a survey.
Secretary of Panchayati Raj and Drinking Water department Deoranjan Kumar Singh has asked all Collectors and Project Directors of DRDAs to prepare an error-free waitlist from the survey list uploaded in Awaas+ or rural housing portal.
Stating the error-free waitlist will be used for providing houses under all the schemes in future, he has also directed include left out eligible families. A set of modalities has been suggested to district chiefs to carry out the scrutiny efficiently and transparently.
The department had sanitised the list of houses in the past which were shown as kutcha houses in Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) and prepared a list of 27,49,617 houses that were to be taken up for construction. Later 13,65,025 families were identified as ineligible on various grounds.
“Since it is very much possible that many of these families would have been included in the survey list for claiming houses, it is essential to sanitise the survey list by using the suspect list. Any family which has been rejected earlier will be enquired properly before keeping them in the waitlist,” Singh said.
The State Government has sanctioned 17,24,776 houses since 2016-17 for families who found place in the waitlist prepared leaving out 10,24,841 houses still to be covered.
“If we treat it as base figure and add 15 per cent of the original target as the families left out from SECC on various accounts and also families which might have been created due to to separation of joint families, then extrapolated number would give us the reference number of kutcha houses in the State,” he said.
Since it is apprehended that the survey list might also have cases of families covered under rural housing schemes in the past but at present the condition of houses may not be good, their names will be deleted from the Awaas+ or rural housing portal as no decision has been taken to cover these families.
Collectors and PDs have been instructed to correct the survey list by the team of officials who have done the original survey and complete the sanitisation process by November 30.