Bengaluru, Feb 5 : The Congress government in Karnataka on Monday denied Prime Minister Narendra Modi's charge that it could not implement the housing scheme for the poor under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) in the state.
"Karnataka had been allotted 3.36 lakh houses for the poor under the scheme, but the state government has constructed only 38,000 houses," Modi said at a Bharatiya Janata Party rally here on Sunday.
In a statement a day after Modi's attack on the ruling Congress in the poll-bound southern state, the Siddaramaiah government said that housing was its priority and it was working on it even without the central government's help.
"The government had promised to construct 15 lakh houses during its tenure from 2013-18, out of which it has already completed 13.71 lakh houses, spending Rs 14,300 crore," a government statement said.
By the end of March, Karnataka would complete the construction of all 15 lakh houses for the urban and rural poor, the statement said.
Under the PMAY (urban) scheme, the state had so far constructed 290,507 houses at a cost of Rs 14,765 crore, it said.
"The central government's share in the urban housing was meant to be Rs 4,357 crore, of which it released only Rs 345 crore, which is not even 10 per cent," the state government claimed.
For the past two years, 145,349 houses were sanctioned to be built in rural areas of the state under the PMAY (rural), of which 137,968 houses were completed, it added.
"The central government released only Rs 696 crore against its supposed share of Rs 1,088 crore, despite which we have built 137,968 houses in villages by utilising our own funds," the state government said.
For 2017-18, the state built 63,843 houses in villages as part of the PMAY (rural) scheme, despite the Centre giving less than 10 per cent of its supposed share, it added.
The PMAY, under the Ministry for Housing and Urban Affairs, aims to provide affordable housing to everyone in the country by 2022.
--IANS
bha/tsb/bg.
Source: IANS
