Indian government may offer homes on rent to migrant labourers in metro cities

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi may expand his pet project for affordable housing.
  
• Government plans to rent out single room houses to migrant labourers in cities with income less than ₹300,000 a year.
• The new proposal in consideration before the upcoming budget may be linked to an ongoing housing scheme.
  

The Modi government is coming up with a new housing plan to provide rented single room tenements to families of migrant labourers, in big urban centres.

This can help address the issue of burgeoning slums in urban centres. For this, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the Ministry of Labour will work jointly, as reported by the Economic Times (ET), weeks before the upcoming Union Budget for 2019-20.

The scheme would address the problem of growing slum settlements and the aspirations of lower income groups to live in a ‘pucca’ house with basic life living facilities.

Beneficiaries of the scheme would be families with income of ₹300, 000 or less.

Pushing forward its ‘Housing for all’ scheme, the government has planned to link the new housing plan with the existing one that is called the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY).

The scheme is designed such that urban local bodies will first register families with an annual income of ₹300,000 or less and then distribute rent vouchers to them. The tenant would then give those vouchers to the owner of the house, which in this case would be the housing board.

A labour cess fund may also be used as capital to initiate the project. “The scheme would be driven by our ministry and housing boards would be roped in to construct economical houses,” the Economic Times reported citing sources.

There is another model which allows private sector firms to construct these houses and use a percentage of area given to them for commercial purpose. But rental policy in housing for all would primarily be working through housing boards. In case of a private developer, the rent vouchers would be redeemable at any citizen service bureau, the ET report said.


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