BHUBANESWAR: Less than 40 per cent of the total urban homeless identified across all civic bodies in state have been provided pucca houses so far.
Sources in the Housing and Urban Development (H&UD) department said more than 3,53,000 homeless families had been identified in the state in the ‘Housing for All’ plan of action survey in 2017-18.
However, a little over 1.33 lakh families, only about 38 per cent, have been provided pucca houses in these seven-and-half years between 2017-18 and 2024-25 fiscal so far.
All the beneficiaries have been provided the houses under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U) as the state didn’t have its own scheme. Housing and Urban Development minister Krushna Chandra Mahapatra had also informed the Assembly recently that Odisha government doesn’t have any system in place to provide pucca houses to urban homeless under its own scheme.
Moreover, the state government has also been unable to ensure construction of all the houses approved for the beneficiaries under PMAY-U. Out of a total of 1,84,627 pucca houses approved for the beneficiaries in the state so far, the government has been able to complete about 1,33,023 housing units so far.
Out of 14,481 pucca houses approved for the urban homeless in Khurda district under PMAY-U, only about 5,042 units have been completed so far. Similarly, work of 8,085 pucca houses against the approved 13,167 have been completed in Koraput district. In Cuttack, the number of PMAY-U housing units completed so far is about 6,800 against the approved target of 10,035.
Considering the delay in completion of houses, state government in November this year had sought extension of the project timeline of PMAY-U, which is set to end on December 31, by another year. Two months back, it had also sought an assistance of around Rs 180 crore from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) to complete several PMAY-U houses that were under different stages of construction.
Officials in the Odisha Urban Housing Mission (OUHM) said the launch of PMAY-U 2.0, unveiled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September this year, will pave way to cover more left out beneficiaries under the scheme. The state government and OUHM have already worked out a plan to take up IEC drive in urban areas to cover more number of beneficiaries under the scheme, they said.