As the government gets ready to unveil the final budget of its term,
BloombergQuint assesses the progress of six key schemes.
As the government gets ready to unveil the final budget of its term,
BloombergQuint assesses the progress of six key schemes.
Modi’s ‘Housing For All’ scheme was aimed at providing low-cost houses to rural and urban poor.
The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin, a restructured version of the Indira Awaas Yojana,
focused on rural areas and was launched on Nov. 20, 2016. The aim: deliver one crore pucca houses to the rural poor by March 31, 2019 in its first phase.
Allocation for the scheme has more than doubled since 2015-16 to nearly Rs 25,000 crore in 2017-18. But the project completion rate has declined from the peak of 75 percent in 2016-17 to 56 percent in 2018-19.
The number of houses completed, however, were higher under Modi’s revamped scheme compared with the Indira Awas Yojana. That may also be because data on completed houses includes backlog of previous years, according to a 2017 report of the 16th parliamentary standing committee on rural development.
The urban housing scheme, launched in June 2015, targeted completing 1.2 crore houses by March 31, 2022. By January this year, nearly 69 lakh houses were approved. Of these, 20 percent were completed, 13.24 lakh houses were already occupied by the beneficiaries and construction had started on the rest.
The Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana provides insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh each to 10.74 crore poor families.
The Ayushman Bharat scheme, as it’s also known, was launched in September last year with an estimated budget of Rs 2,000 crore.
The scheme is run by the independent government body National Health Authority formed under the Ministry of Health.
Nearly 9 lakh beneficiaries had been admitted to hospitals by Jan. 16, 2019, for which claims worth Rs 1,202 crore were paid.
So far, 16,952 hospitals have been empanelled, more than half of which are private.
The implementing body has issued 73.83 lakh electronic cards, used for validation of beneficiaries.
The government wants to eventually expand the scheme to a universal healthcare model by converting sub-centres and primary health centres to health and wellness centres with comprehensive care for communicable and non-communicable diseases.
UDAY, or Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana, was introduced in 2015 to improve financial and operational efficiencies of state electricity distribution companies. The scheme will miss its target due to underperforming electricity distribution companies.
UDAY sought to curb aggregate technical and commercial losses—including those due to transmission—transfer debt to states and install smart meters. States haven’t met their targets on most parameters, including tariff revisions, installing smart meters and providing electricity access to all households.
The Modi government has undertaken two key initiatives to improve access to banking services, and specifically, to credit.
The first was the Jan Dhan Yojana, which was launched in 2014, aimed to ensure that all Indians get bank accounts.
This has been attempted for many years in the past but the outcome was not as desired. The Modi government pushed the scheme on a war footing,
while admittedly the burden of its implementation fell on public-sector banks.
Still, the scheme has meant that 80 percent of Indians now have bank accounts. According to the most recent status report on the Jan Dhan website,
accounts opened under this scheme now hold Rs 87,551 crore in deposits. Arun Jaitley, in response to a question in Lok Sabha last month,
disclosed that about 23 percent of these accounts are inoperative. That’s not a large proportion and with direct benefit transfers being pushed actively, account usage will improve.
Launched in September 2014, the ‘Make in India’ initiative was one of Modi’s first big initiatives. But it failed to take off.
Foreign investments into the manufacturing sector have waned even as FDI into the nation rose by over $13 billion since 2014-15, according to RBI data.
The contribution of manufacturing in India's gross value has remained stagnant.
Foreign direct investment rose during Modi's term but inflows into manufacturing declined.
The second key scheme in improving the spread of banking is the attempt to push more credit through to small businesses under the Mudra Yojana.
The three-year-old scheme provides refinance for loans up to Rs 10 lakh given out by banks and non-bank lenders.
Loans worth Rs 2.54 lakh crore were classified as Mudra loans in 2017-18, according to the scheme’s annual report.
This is an increase of 41 percent over the Rs 1.80 lakh crore of loans sanctioned in this category.
For 2018-19, a target of Rs 3 lakh crore has been set. Refinance to commercial banks increased from Rs 1,886.73 crore
in 2016-17 to Rs 4,405.73 crore in 2017-18, according to the annual report.
However, there are two concerns regarding this scheme. The first is that banks are reclassifying existing loans as Mudra loans,
thereby not increasing the flow of credit. The second concern remains that of asset quality. However,
so far, bad loan ratios have remained in check. According to the latest annual report, the non-performing assets ratio in the portfolio currently stands at 5.38 percent.