From Housing Delivery to Household Adoption

Nandni Joshi

From Housing Delivery to Household Adoption

Author(s)	Ms. Nandni Joshi
Country	India
Abstract	Public housing programmes are often evaluated through houses sanctioned and completed, although the welfare value of a dwelling depends on whether the intended household can actually occupy it. This paper examines the completion–occupancy gap under India’s Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana–Urban (PMAY-U) using parliamentary administrative data and a behavioural-public-economics framework. The Standing Committee on Housing and Urban Affairs reported that, among completed units in two PMAY-U verticals, 4,12,401 of 9,01,953 Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP) houses and 47,510 of 67,806 In-Situ Slum Redevelopment (ISSR) houses were unoccupied as of its December 2024 report. These figures imply non-occupancy rates of 45.7% and 70.1%, respectively, and 47.4% across the two verticals combined. The higher ISSR rate cautions against treating relocation costs as a sufficient explanation. A Lok Sabha reply dated 19 March 2026 subsequently identified incomplete civic infrastructure, migration or reluctance to leave livelihoods and social networks, beneficiary-share constraints, and documentation and allotment delays as reasons for non-occupancy. It also reported 97.30 lakh completed and 94.83 lakh occupied houses across PMAY-U and PMAY-U 2.0, with legacy Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM) houses included in the aggregate totals. Because the later figures combine programme phases and contain legacy-stock adjustments, they are not directly comparable with the 2024 vertical-specific snapshot. The paper’s contribution is diagnostic rather than causal: it distinguishes structural unavailability from household non-adoption and develops a framework for measuring both. It argues that completion should not be treated as equivalent to effective housing access and proposes reason-coded, stage-wise occupancy monitoring. The available aggregate data do not establish the causal effect or relative importance of behavioural mechanisms.
Keywords	PMAY U; housing policy; non-occupancy; household adoption; behavioural public policy; social networks; urban resettlement.
Field	Sociology > Economics
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 6, November-December 2026
Published On	2026-11-03

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International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

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From Housing Delivery to Household Adoption

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