Deconstructing PMAY-U: What the numbers reveal

The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana Urban (PMAY-U), an ongoing programme since 2015, is India’s largest urban housing programme. An unprecedented 11.9 million houses, which is about 10% of the Census 2011 urban housing stock, have been sanctioned across its five sub-schemes. The aggressive housing agendas of a few states and the popularity of the Beneficiary-Led Construction (BLC) sub-scheme (which provides subsidies for the construction of a house to land-owning Economically Weaker Section (EWS) households—i.e., households with an annual income of ₹3 lakh or less) in small cities were key to PMAY-U’s scale. We find that PMAY-U better serves small cities compared to million-plus cities. Two aspects of PMAY-U warrant attention: its poor coverage of slum households and the significant number of delayed and yet-to-be-completed houses. Some of the issues affecting PMAY-U’s implementation are specific to PMAY-U and easier to resolve, while others are systemic in nature. Some of the systemic issues are complex property records and registration systems, slow dispute resolution, and EWS households’ poor access to institutional finance. Based on our findings, we propose improvements in programme design and monitoring, as well as broader systemic measures required to make the recently announced second phase of PMAY-U more impactful than the first.