Slum Rehabilitation Authority & Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana

Everyone throughout the course of their life has needs, wants, and desires that they wish to fulfill. While wants and desires are reserved for the more affluent ones, a considerable portion of people are unable to satisfy their basic needs like food, water, air, and shelter, let alone even think about moving up the ladder. The feeling of owning your own house and calling it “home” is a privilege that everyone can’t afford. To improve this situation, the Government of India came up with several schemes, initiatives, subsidies, and acts. Some of the most prominent schemes to improve the housing situation were Slum Rehabilitation Authority and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. Let us understand how both schemes work and the relationship between them.

Slum Rehabilitation Authority

In December 1995, upon the recommendations made by the Afzulpurkar Committee, the Government of Maharashtra accepted and amended the Maharashtra Slum Area (Improvement, Clearance, and Redevelopment) Act, 1971 to provide for the creation of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA). The SRA was to serve as the planning authority for all slum areas in the jurisdiction of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. The Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Shri Uddhav Thackeray, is the Chairperson of SRA and IAS Officer, Shri Satish Lokhande, is a full-time Chief Executive Officer of the Authority. The members include ministers, elected members of the State Legislature, Secretaries of concern State Government Department and some non-official members.

The goal of Slum Rehabilitation Authority is to oversee slum areas in the city by planning ways to redevelop them and rehabilitate their dwellers. The Slum Rehabilitation authority endeavors to provide quick single-window clearances for types of approvals required for rehabilitation such as the formation of co-operative societies, certification of eligibility of slum-dwellers, taking punitive action on non-participating slum-dwellers obstructing the scheme, survey, and measurement on slum lands grant of building permissions, leasing of rehabilitation plots and free-sale plots and updating of property cards (PR cards). By amendments made to the MR & TP Act 1966, the SRA authority has been granted the power to prepare and submit proposals for modification of the Development Plan of Greater Mumbai.

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana

The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban (PMAY-U) is a flagship mission of the Government of India. It was launched on 25th June 2015 as the Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojana and has been implemented by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA). The goal was to address the urban housing shortage amongst EWS, LIG, and MIG categories including slum dwellers by ensuring a ‘pucca’ house to all eligible urban households by the year 2022, the same year our nation completes 75 years of independence.

There are 4 primary components to this scheme, which can be understood below, in brief.

1. Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme: This scheme provides a maximum subsidy of 6% on the interest payable on home loans.

2. Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP): Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP) provides financial assistance up to Rs 1.5 Lakh by the Central Government to EWS (Economic Weaker Section) families for the purchase of houses.

3. ISSR (in situ- Slum Redevelopment): This scheme aims to rehabilitate land as a resource in association with private organizations to provide houses to families living in such areas. The Central Government determines the prices, and the State Governments investigate the projects.

4. Individual house construction led by beneficiaries: This component of the PMAY scheme targets families who cannot avail of benefits under the other components. Such beneficiaries will avail of benefits up to Rs. 1.5 Lakh from the Central Government for the construction of such houses.

There are two parts to Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana: the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana Urban and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana Gramin. The PMAY-Urban covers approximately 4,331 towns and cities. It has progressed in three phases, in the first phase it covered a hundred cities in select states and union territories in the years 2015-17, in the second phase it covered two hundred additional cities in the years 2017-19, and finally, in its third phase, it covered the remaining cities between the years 2019-22. Totally it has sanctioned 83 lakh houses, completed 26 lakh houses of which 23 lakh houses have already been occupied. The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin, earlier known as the Indira Awas Yojana, was primarily targeted at the rural sector of India. Its objective was to boost affordability by providing financial assistance to the homeless and those residing in decrepit houses through assistance in the construction of ‘pucca’ houses. The shared cost ratio for implementation of the scheme (between the Central and State Government) was decided at 60:40 for plain regions and 90:10 for north-eastern and hilly regions.

How are SRA & PMAY similar?

The Slum Rehabilitation Authority and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana are not exactly similar, but they are branches of the same tree, which is “Housing for all”. Both were formed to ensure that no Indian is devoid of the necessity of having a house to live in. Both were launched to improve the housing situation and provide all kinds of assistance to the economically weaker sections to grow with the additional development of the urban cities.

How are they different?

Both initiatives go hand in hand. Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, as the name suggests is an “initiative” or a plan (yojana) that has been made for the beneficiaries. The execution of this plan is undertaken by authorities, one of them being the Slum Redevelopment Authority. PMAY is the idea of providing housing to everyone in the society, including the ones who are not financially capable yet, and SRA, along with a lot of other equipped bodies is the execution and authority that implements this noble idea.

Authorities have realized this and called for these two initiatives to join hands and work together. Recently, the State government’s wish to bring the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) was granted. By linking the two programs over 20 lakh slum dwellers in Mumbai alone are likely to benefit as slum dwellers who were earlier ineligible will now be included under the SRA and be given homes under the PMAY. 

“Once the SRA is brought under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, the saleable stock of the former could be converted into affordable stock with the help of the subsidy from the latter,”  Mr. Devendra Fadnavis, Ex-Chief Minister of Maharashtra

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