PM Modi’s ‘Housing for All by 2022’ scheme was approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday, June 17. The scheme involves providing housing to the urban poor of India.

The scheme expects to rehabilitate slum dwellers with participation of private developers, promote affordable housing for weaker section through credit-linked subsidies, promote affordable housing in partnership with public and private sectors and subsidy for beneficiary-led individual house construction or enhancement.

The slum rehabilitation programme will have a central grant of Rs 1 lakh per house on an average. The economically weaker sections (EWS) and other low income groups will get a benefit of about Rs 2.3 lakh each thanks to the credit-linked interest subsidy component.

India needs to develop about 11 crore housing units in the next 7 years with investments worth more than Rs 128 lakh crore, according to a KPMG report.

This scheme plans to cover the entire urban India – 4,041 statutory towns, in three phases. The first phase (April 2015 to March 2017) will cover 100 cities, second phase (April 2017 to March 2019) will cover another 200 cities and the third phase (April 2019 to March 2022) will cover the remaining cities. Government has estimated the number of houses to be built by 2022 at 2 crore houses.

The government is also looking at including a technology sub-mission to facilitate the use of modern, innovative and green technologies and building material for faster and quality construction of houses.

Additionally, it will open the door for preparation and adoption of layout designs and building plans which are suitable for different geo-climatic zones along with assisting states and cities in utilising environment friendly and disaster resistant technologies.

Several housing schemes in the past have failed to eradicate the problem of slums and illegal housing in the country, thanks to rampant corruption and poor execution. It remains to be seen how effective his scheme turns out to be.