Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday announced in her interim budget that the government would provide housing for 2 crore rural families over the next five years.

However, land and housing rights activists said that with about 1.9 crore households already on the waiting list for government housing, Thursday’s announcement holds out little hope for the lakhs of deserving families still unidentified for housing support.

“Despite the challenges due to Covid, implementation of PM Awas Yojana (Grameen) continued and we are close to achieving the target of 3 crore houses,” Sitharaman said.

“Two crore more houses will be taken up in the next five years to meet the requirement arising from the increase in the number of families.”

The announcement unwittingly belies Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s old promise of “housing for all” by 2022, a deadline later extended to March 2024. With Thursday’s announcement, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana Grameen (PMAY-G) is set to remain in force till at least 2029.

Families like that of Abakasa Behera, a 50-year-old Dalit from Kapileswarpur village in Puri district of Odisha whom The Telegraph spoke with last week, would draw little hope from Sitharaman’s latest promise.

Abakasa lives in a one-room, asbestos-roof house with his wife, three children and mother. He and his late father Sagar Behera had failed to secure inclusion in the PMAY-G beneficiaries’ list despite applying to the administration repeatedly over three decades.

Abakasa can get a house only if the Modi government asks the states to identify new families for the benefit. However, the fixing of the target at 2 crore raises doubts about any fresh identification of beneficiaries.

In 2016, the Centre announced a target of “housing for all” by March 2022. Based on socio-economic data from the Socio-Economic Caste Census of 2011-12, the government identified 2.95 crore households as PMAY-G beneficiaries.

The scheme provides every beneficiary household with Rs 1.2 lakh in the plains, and Rs 1.3 lakh in hilly areas, to build a house.

Running their own housing schemes, the state governments have built nearly 1 crore houses for families from among the PMAY-G’s list of 2.95 crore. The Centre expects to be able to complete the remaining 1.95 crore houses by March 2024.

In 2018, the state governments conducted Awas Plus surveys that identified 3.57 crore additional households that needed housing support. But the Union rural development ministry contested the figure and asked the states to verify it. After scrutiny, the Awas Plus list was pruned to 2.8 crore. From among these, the rural development ministry has sanctioned houses for 91 lakh families.

The remaining 1.9 crore identified households are already on the waiting list, with most of them from rural areas.

P.V. Rajagopal, chairman of the Ekta Parishad, an organisation that advocates land reforms and housing for the poor, said many more rural households remain that need housing, and the government’s announcement would leave out a large number of these unidentified families.