The Union government's flagship housing programme, launched in 2015 for towns (PMAY-Urban) and in 2016 for villages (PMAY-Gramin), which gives financial help to poor and lower-income families to build, buy or upgrade a pucca house with basic amenities, usually in the name of a woman of the household.
Housing shortage has long been one of the most visible signs of poverty in India. Government studies in the early 2010s estimated a shortage of close to 19 million homes in cities, concentrated almost entirely among economically weaker sections and low-income groups, and a much larger number of rural families living in kutcha or dilapidated houses. Slums grew as migrants found no affordable homes near work.
Earlier responses included the Indira Awaas Yojana for rural housing from 1985, and urban schemes such as the Valmiki Ambedkar Awas Yojana and the Rajiv Awas Yojana. These suffered from small unit assistance, poor targeting, low quality and weak monitoring. The 2015–16 restructuring brought both rural and urban housing under a single brand with a "Housing for All" goal, larger grants, direct transfer of money to beneficiaries' bank accounts, geo-tagged photographs of construction stages, and convergence with toilets, electricity, cooking gas and drinking water schemes.
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