As part of IHF’s first ever field engagement related to PMAY-U implementation support to state governments, IHF successfully enumerated 3,000+ households for the PMAY-U demand survey in the town of Morigaon in Assam, in strong adherence with the PMAY-U mission guidelines.
As mandated under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Urban (PMAY-U) guidelines, the Government of Assam (GoA) had rolled out a demand survey in early-2016. Notably, this activity was regarded as the initial phase for establishing the State PMAY-U Mission in Assam. However, this exercise could be conceived for only the top 9 cities and towns of the state. Moreover, several challenges related to documentation and processes created bottlenecks during implementation by the state authorities. Consequently, GoA was seeking a competent entity to assess the ground-level challenges and support the state in reconceptualising and implementing the PMAY-U demand survey in the state.
GoA’s keenness on collaborating to achieve efficiency landed IHF an opportunity in December 2016 to begin its evolutionary journey in providing strategic support to state governments for PMAY-U implementation. This journey began with IHF undertaking a successful demonstration of conducting a PMAY-U demand survey to assess the housing needs in a city using a process of data collection that was customised to the specific context of the state. Successful implementation of this pilot allowed the State PMAY-U Mission to subsequently roll-out this data collection process for conducting demand surveys across all 97 towns of the state.
This is the story of the impact created by IHF, on behalf of the State PMAY-U Mission in Assam, in the small town of Morigaon.
Innovative approaches in implementing pilot demand survey in Assam
IHF was entrusted to demonstrate a robust demand survey methodology in Morigaon, Assam. Morigaon is a mid-sized town, administered by Morigaon Municipal Board and has a population of 29,164 as per 2011 Census. The current population is estimated to be around 40,000.
The objective of this partnership was to conceptualise and implement a systematic, efficient and inclusive housing demand survey model that could be replicated pan-Assam, as well as to explore ways in which the urban local bodies (ULBs) could be equipped to take charge of the overall implementation of the PMAY-U Mission in their respective cities/towns. IHF engaged staff from local NGOs and students of Master of Social Work for building its front-end survey team.
The strive for demonstrating an effective methodology for conducting a demand survey manifested itself into a reinventing process, whereby the IHF team gradually and sequentially experimented with three unique approaches of data collection -
Approach 1: Ward-level awareness camp, followed by door-to-door form collection;
Approach 2: Door-to-door awareness camp along with door-to-door form collection; and
Approach 3: Door-to-door awareness camp, followed by ward-wise centralised form collection at the Municipal Board office.
The third and final approach was determined to be most efficient in terms of resource efficiency, degree of coverage of awareness camps; and the number of forms collected.
IHF also proactively supported households in organising their documents as per PMAY-U mandates; brought in innovations to the data collection process with the replacement of paper surveys with digitised tab-based surveys for improving data accuracy and geotagging the kutcha houses; and prepared an innovative document checklist in the local language that systematically catered to each of the four verticals under PMAY-U, to deconstruct the complex provisions within the Mission guidelines for the benefit of local residents.
This opportunity eventually allowed IHF to be at the forefront of establishing a formal State PMAY-U Mission in Assam, while also taking IHF’s work to a new geography - Northeast India!
Over the four years since this initial engagement, IHF has expanded its suite of strategic implementation support to state PMAY-U missions across three more states. Within Assam, IHF has been able to reinforce continuity in its pursuit of enabling access to housing for low-income communities through formal support to the State PMAY-U Mission during 2017, followed by support at the district level for housing facilitation services.