Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana : Civil Services Mentor Magazine: JANUARY - 2018

::Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana::

Public housing programme in the country started with the rehabilitation of refugees immediately after independence and since then, it has been a major focus area of the Government as an instrument of poverty alleviation. In 1957, as a part of Community development movement, a village housing programme was introduced providing loans to individuals and cooperatives, of upto 5,500/- per unit. Only 67,000 houses could be constructed till 1979.
Specific focus on rural housing has its origin in the wage employment programme of National rural employment programme. By allowing construction of houses for SC/STs and freed bonded labourers. Rural housing programme,as an independent programme , started with Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY) in January 1996. Although IAY addressed the housing needs in the rural areas, certain gaps were identified during the concurrent evaluations and the performance Audit by Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India in 2014. These gaps, i.e. non assessment of housing The shortage, lack of transparency in selection of beneficiaries, low the quality of the house and lack of technical supervision, lack convergence, loans not availed by beneficiaries and weak the mechanism for monitoring was limiting the impact and outcomes of the programme.
To address these gaps in the rural housing program and in view of Government’s commitment to providing “Housing for All’’ by the scheme 2022, the of has IAY has been re-structured into Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana –Gramin (PMAY-G) w.e.f. 1st April 2016.PMAY-G aims at providing a pucca house, with basic amenities, to all houseless householder and those households living in
kutcha and dilapidated house, by 2022. The immediate the objective is to cover 1.00 crore household living in kutcha house/dilapidated house in three years from 2016-17 to 2018- 19.The minimum size of the house has been increased to 25 sq.mt (from 20 sq.mt) with a hygienic cooking space. The unit assistance has been increased from Rs. 70,000 to Rs. 1.20 lakh in plain
and from Rs 75,000 to Rs 1.30 lakh in hilly states, difficult areas and IAP district. The beneficiary is entitled to 90.95 person day of unskilled labour from MGNREGA. The assistance for construction of toilet shall be leveraged through convergence with SBM-G, MGNREGS or any other dedicated the source of funding. Convergence for piped drinking water, electricity connection, LPG gas
connection etc. different Government programmers are also to be attempted.
The cost of unit assistance is to be shared between Central and State Government in the ratio 60:40 in plain areas and 90:10 for North Eastern and the Himalayan States. From the annual budgetary grant for PMAY-G,90% of funds is to be released to States/UTs for the construction of new house under PMAY-G This would also include 4%allocation towards Administrative expenses .5%of the budgetary grant is to be retained at the central Level as reserve found for special Projects. The annual allocation to the states is to be based on the Annual Action Plan (AAP) approved by the Empowered Committee and the found to States /UTs is to be released in two equal installments.
One of the most important features of PMAY-G is the selection of beneficiary. To ensure that assistance is targeted at those who are genuinely deprived and that the selection is objective and verifiable, PMAY-G instead of selecting a the beneficiary from among the BPL households selects beneficiary using housing deprivation parameters in the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), 2011 data which is to be verified by the Gram Sabhas. The SECC data captures specific deprivation related to housing among households. Using the data households that are homeless and living in 0,1 and 2 kutcha wall and kutcha roof houses can be segregated and targeted . The Permanent Wait List so generated also ensures that the states have the ready list of the household to be covered under the scheme in the coming years (through Annual Select Lists) leading to better planning of implementation. To address grievances in beneficiary selection an appellate process has also been put in place.
Towards better quality of construction, setting up of a Nation Technical Support Agency (NTSA) at the national level is envisaged. One of the major constraints in quality house construction is the lack of the sufficient number of skilled masons. To address this, a pan-India training and certification programme of Masons has been launched in the States/UTs. This will, in addition, and career progression for rural masons. For timely construction/completion to ensure good quality of house construction, it has also been envisaged to tag a PMAY-G the beneficiary with a field level Government functionary and a Rural Mason.The beneficiary to be assisted by in-house construction with a bouquet of house design typologies inclusive of disaster resilience features the are suitable to their local geo-climatic conditions . These designs are developed through an elaborate public consultative process. This exercise will ensure that the beneficiary does not over-construct in the initial stages of house building which often results in the incomplete house or the beneficiary is forced to borrow money to complete the house.
In PMAY-G, programme implementation and monitoring is to be carried out through an end to end e-Governance model- Using AwaasSoft and Awaas App. While AwaasSoft is a workflow enabled, web-based electronic service delivery platform through which all critical function of PMAY-G, right from identification of beneficiary to providing construction linked assistance (through PFMS),will be carried out; AwaasApp-a the mobile application is to be used to monitor real time, evidence based progress of house construction through date and time stamped and georeferenced photographs of the house. The tow IT application help identify the slip ups in the achievement of targets during the course of implementation of the programme. All payments to beneficiary is to be through DBT to beneficiary’s Bank/post office accounts registered in AwaasSoft IS.The States have to come up with their Annual Action Plan of PMAY-That will include a plan for convergence in with other Government programme . The mechanism for convergence in PMAY-G is also to be strengthened through a system to system real-time transfer of information between the programme that are to converge with PMAY-G.
A willing beneficiary is to be facilitated to avail institution finance up to Rs.70,000.-which would be monitored through the SLBC, DLBC and DLBC.The programme implementation is to be monitored not only electronically, but also through community participation (Social Audit), Member of Parliament (DISHA Committee), Central and State Government officials, National Level Monitors etc.

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National Nutrition Mission:

India face problems related to Infant mortality and Maternal mortality at a large scale. India also receives highest number of deaths in many acute diseases. There are various reasons for these problems but most important among them is that in India expenditure on health in very less percentage of the GDP. While in USA it is close to 14 percent in India it is close to five percent. Among this percentage government spending of health is close to one percentage only. This puts an added burden on the public to spent from their pocket. And in a country where large section of population is poor this burden is unsustainable. In last few decades economic growth of India has been very good but resultant public spending on the health sector has not improved much. The growth of India’s economy now permits this long overdue increase in public financing of health. Good health has implications for development of country as well this has been recognized by government in recent initiatives like National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) and a multitude of state sponsored health insurance schemes. The social objectives of all of these schemes would need to be merged and their scope considerably expanded to create a valued and viable model of UHC in India.
Every human body is a stakeholder in the health sector of India. That is why every individual must be motivated to a lead healthy life and thereby keep the burden on the public health infrastructure to the minimum. Thankfully, we are a young nation. With 65 percent of the population under the age of 35, it should not be too difficult to make optimal use of every available Rupee. Public Health
is in state list, which makes it a state subject, the Central Government can only provide a supplementing role to the efforts of the States/UTs. Under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) central government provide accessible, affordable and quality healthcare to the rural population. National Health Mission (NHM) was approved the central government which subsumes the National Urban Health Mission (NUHM) and the National Rural Health mission objective of national health mission are also the same to provide universal access to equitable, affordable and quality health care services to all the population.
Now government has approved the setting up of National Nutrition Mission (NNM) with a three year budget of Rs.9046.17 crore commencing from 2017-18. There are a number of schemes directly/indirectly affecting the nutritional status of children (0-6 years age) and pregnant women and lactating mothers. In Spite of these, level of malnutrition and related problems in the country is high. There is no dearth of schemes but lack of creating synergy and linking the schemes with each other to achieve common goal. NNM through robust convergence mechanism and other components would strive to create the synergy.

Features:

1. The NNM, as an apex body, will monitor, supervise, fix targets and guide the nutrition related interventions across the Ministries.

2. The proposal consists of

Mapping of various Schemes contributing towards addressing malnutrition
Introducing a very robust convergence mechanism
ICT based Real Time Monitoring system
incentivizing States/UTs for meeting the targets
incentivizing Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) for using IT based tools
Eliminating registers used by AWWs
Introducing measurement of height of children at the Anganwadi Centres (AWCs)
Social Audits
Setting-up Nutrition Resource Centres, involving masses through Jan Andolan for their participation on nutrition through various activities, among others.

The programme through the targets will strive to reduce the level of stunting, undernutrition, anemia and low birth weight babies. It will create synergy, ensure better monitoring, issue alerts for timely action, and encourage States/UTs to perform, guide and supervise the line Ministries and States/UTs to achieve the targeted goals.More than 10 crore people will be benefitted by this programme. All the States and districts will be covered in a phased manner i.e. 315 districts in 2017-18, 235 districts in 2018-19 and remaining districts in 2019-20.

Financial Outlay:

An amount of Rs. 9046.17 crore will be expended for three years commencing from 2017-18. This will be funded by Government Budgetary Support (50%) and 50% by IBRD or other MDB. Government budgetary support would be 60:40 between Centre and States/UTs, 90:10 for NER and Himalayan States and 100% for UTs without legislature. Total Government of India share over
a period of three years would be Rs. 2849.54 crore.

Implementation strategy and targets:

Implementation strategy would be based on intense monitoring and Convergence Action Plan right upto the grass root level. NNM will be rolled out in three phases from 2017-18 to 2019-20. NNM targets to reduce stunting, under-nutrition, anemia (among young children, women and adolescent girls) and reduce low birth weight by 2%, 2%, 3% and 2% per annum respectively. Although the target to reduce Stunting is at least 2% p.a., Mission would strive to achieve reduction in Stunting from 38.4% (NFHS-4) to 25% by 2022 (Mission 25 by 2022).

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