Housing schemes miss the poor

BUILDING INDIA PART - 2/ HOUSING

Government schemes are notorious for missing targets. But these numbers are impressive. Andhra Pradesh was supposed to help build 1,30,130 houses for the poor under the Indira Awas Yojana in 2005-06. It built 132,521. In the first ten months of 2006-07, it built 84,192 houses and looks well on course to achieve the year's target of 138,342.

A visit to the villages shows the targets may have been met but the gains have not gone fully to the poorest of the poor, for whom the programme was started.

Take Pentanna, who is overseeing the construction of his house, being built with a Rs 25,000 subsidy from the Centre and the state (the Centre gives 75 per cent under the Indira Awas Yojana and the state the rest), in his Dantanuru village in Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh.

The house is almost complete and looks much better than the other houses built under the scheme in his village. Records show Pentanna also benefited from a housing scheme for the homeless as he is from a scheduled caste and is physically challenged.

Also, he owns a proper house in the village, which makes him ineligible for the Indira Awas Yojana. Pentanna owns around 2.5 acres in the village and his son, who works for a construction firm in Bangalore, sends money home. This enabled him to invest more than Rs one lakh on the new house.

There are more such cases in the village. Kistamma, a widow, lives with her son Venkatanna. While Kistamma got a house under the Indira Awas Yojana, Venkatanna is a beneficiary of the state government-sponsored housing scheme, "Indiramma." Thus, the family is constructing two houses.

Take the example of Savaranna, a Dalit who has two wives. He built one house under the Indira Awas Yojana for the first wife and another under Indiramma for the second.

These three cases are out of the 10 beneficiaries this correspondent met, indicating that such discrepancies are widespread.

Though Pentanna and others mentioned above fall in the below poverty line category, village authorities said at least another 30 people in the village were in dire need of a new house.

Mallikarjuna Rao, superintendent engineer, Andhra Pradesh State Housing Corporation, said, "The beneficiaries are selected by the revenue department at the mandal level. We are just an implementing agency. Involvement of more than one department sometimes leads to lack of coordination."

To avoid this and to promote transparency, the government has prescribed that the list of beneficiaries be announced in the gram sabha, and approved by the entire village. This was not done in the village.

"These 10 houses for 2005-06 were allotted before I became president and yes, the list was not announced in the gram sabha," sarpanch Sreenivasulu said. "I will ensure that such things are not repeated," he added.

Even as the state government officials maintained that the permanent wait lists (made compulsory by the Centre) were in place to pick up the most needy, it was not evident in the villages.