Rural home scheme incentive

• Bihar has come up with an incentive scheme to speed up implementation of the Prime Minister’s rural housing scheme in the state.
• Panchayat-level rural housing assistants will get Rs 600 for each home built within four months, block-level supervisors will get Rs 70, and block-level account assistants and executive assistants will get Rs 30.
• Beneficiaries will be entitled to Rs 1,000. If a house is built in four to six months, the incentive will be halved, and slashed by 5 per cent for delay of every 15 days after that.
• Chief minister Nitish Kumar shared these details during a rural development department programme on Friday where he distributed papers of the first instalment of the scheme and also keys of some of the completed homes.
• An average 500 to 1,000 houses are to be constructed under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Rural) in every panchayat in the state.
• A total of 11.76 lakh dwelling units have been sanctioned for Bihar for 2016-17 and 2017-18.
• According to the PMAY norms, the Centre and the states share the project cost in 60:40 ratio.

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY):

• Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) is an initiative by Government of India in which affordable housing will be provided to the urban poor with a target of building 20 million affordable houses by 31 March 2022.
• It has two components: Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) (PMAY-U) for the urban poor and Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana (Gramin) (PMAY-G and also PMAY-R) for the rural poor.
• This scheme is converged with other schemes to ensure houses have a toilet, Saubhagya Yojana electricity connection, Ujjwala Yojana LPG gas connection, access to drinking water and Jan Dhan banking facilities, etc.
• Cumulative total number of funded houses approved thus far is 39,25,240 in urban area including the subsumed RAY scheme and completion of construction of 5 million rural houses by March 2018 and 10 million rural houses by March 2019.

By: Ziyaur Rahman