Families with any member earning more than ₹15,000 a month will be ineligible for the central government’s premier rural housing scheme under revised criteria that are likely to leave many casual workers and farmers out of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Grameen (PMAY-G).

A social activist said that taking inflation into account, the existing cut-off of ₹10,000 — decided when the scheme was started on April 1, 2016 — should have been raised to ₹20,000, and that an income criterion of ₹15,000 was “unjustified”.

On August 9, the Union cabinet took several tight-fisted decisions while approving a proposal to assist the construction of 2 crore rural houses between 2024 and 2029.

It rejected a proposal to raise the assistance from ₹1.2 lakh per house in the plains to ₹2 lakh and from ₹1.3 lakh in the hills to ₹2.2 lakh.

As for the new eligibility criteria, junior rural development minister Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani provided the details in the Lok Sabha through a written reply on December 3.

Under the old eligibility criteria of 2016, a family with any member earning more ₹10,000 a month, or a family with a mechanised two-wheeler or three-wheeler, a mechanised fishing boat, a landline phone or a refrigerator was ineligible for the scheme’s benefits.

While raising the income cut-off to ₹15,000, the revised criteria have dropped the
bar on mechanised two-wheelers, mechanised fishing boats, landline phones and
refrigerators.

Certain criteria that automatically exclude families from the scheme have remained intact: such as those having a Kisan Credit Card with a credit limit of ₹50,000 or more, those with a mechanised three-wheeler or four-wheeler or agricultural equipment, those with any member as a government employee, and those with any member paying income tax or professional taxes.

The earlier criteria excluded from the scheme families owning 2.5 acres or more of
irrigated land and at least one irrigation equipment, and those owning 5 acres or more of irrigated land for two or more crop seasons, among others.

Under the new criteria, families owning 2.5 acres or more of irrigated land or 5 acres or more of un-irrigated land are ineligible.

The wage rates notified by some states for casual workers are higher than ₹500 a day. Social activists fear that casual workers in these states might across the board be deemed to be earning over ₹15,000 a month and excluded from the PMAY-G.

According to the National Sample Survey report on “Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India, 2019”, the average family income of farmers was ₹29,348 in Meghalaya, ₹26,701 in Punjab and ₹29,225 in Arunachal Pradesh.

Anees Thillenkery, secretary of the Ekta Parishad, a civil society organisation spearheading a movement for a legally entitled right to homestead land for the landless, said that in terms of purchasing power, ₹10,000 in 2016 was equivalent to ₹20,000 in 2024.

“Going by normal inflation and the depreciation of the value of money, denying housing benefits to a family if one of its members earns ₹15,000 a month is unjustified. Such a condition will deny a large section of the working class in many states,” Thillenkery said.

He said the focus on digitisation and the digital authentication of beneficiaries was creating a bottleneck in the disbursal of benefits.