Indira Awas Yojana- Hope of Roof over Rural Poor Head: A Critical Analysis

From time immemorial, housing and shelter have been a basic and fundamental prerequisite for human existence. A house of one's own is still a distant dream for millions of rural folk in the country. Housing availability is an indicator of the quality of life that citizens enjoy and also essential for healthy and civilized existence. India has registered significant progress in housing arrangement for the rural people over the last few decades. In spite of the progress made, rural housing problems continue to be daunting in terms of growing population, rampant speculation coupled with spiralling prices of land and houses. It is challenge to government to secure affordable and adequate shelter to the homeless. Various programmes have been launched by the government to fulfil the housing requirement to the rural poor. It has been experienced that due to lack of awareness about these programmes, rural people have not been able to take full benefit out of these programmes. So keeping in view the above point in consideration the present study entitled “Indira Awas Yojana- Hope of roof over rural poor: A critical assessment” was planned with special focus on peoples’ awareness, participation, satisfaction and constraints faced by them in harnessing the benefits from the programmes. The study was conducted in Kashi Vidyapeeth block of Varanasi district of Uttar Pradesh. The findings of the study reveals that a total of 75 per cent of the respondents had medium level of awareness regarding developmental aspects of IAY followed by low level of awareness (16.67%) and high level of awareness (8.33%). The average levels of awareness the after interventions were 10.01 whereas before interventions it was only 6.88. A cumulative of 61.66 per cent of the respondents showed their satisfaction about IAY programme. Out of these, 24.16 per cent were highly satisfied and 37.50 per cent were satisfied.