The Centre has woefully failed to meet the target of house construction under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna (PMAY).

Against the target of constructing one crore  rural dwellings  by March 31, 2019, only 60 lakh houses have been built so far since the scheme was launched by  Prime Minister Narendra Modi  on November 20, 2016.

According to the data available with the Union Rural Development Ministry, the Government  has to build  40,30,815 dwelling units in next four months to achieve the target of providing 99,55,801 houses in the rural areas by March 31, 2019. The States have fixed the lower target at 99,38,101 dwelling units in the rural areas.

From the time of the inception of the scheme, around 59,24,986 houses have been constructed till November 30, 2018. In the first phase under the PMAY-G, the target is to complete one crore houses by March 31, 2019. The Government is eyeing to construct a total 2.95 crore safe and secure pucca houses for the rural population by 2022.

A senior official from the Ministry exuded confidence that the States will be able to help faster completion of quality houses under the PMAY-G.

He said the main bottleneck has been removed by payment of assistance directly into the beneficiary account through the IT-DBT platform from a single nodal account maintained at the state level.

Also, he said to ensure transparency geo-tagging of the constructed houses has been done.

He said there is no shortage of funds under the scheme. The official said performance of many States in PMAY (G) has started picking up now, and it is hoped that those laggard States like Bihar and Odisha would equal some of the other better performing states.

Since some Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY) houses were still incomplete, the Rural Development Ministry was given a target of 1.02 crore houses, which included completion of two lakh incomplete IAY houses.  This was broken up in 51 lakh houses in 2017-18 and 51 lakh houses in 2018-19, said the official.