Assam Diaries: Demonstrating Housing Demand Assessment Models in Morigaon, Assam
November 17, 2020
- By Sayali Marawar
Lead - Field Engagements at IHF
In the initial phase of implementing the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Urban (PMAY-U), states were required to undertake a demand survey, covering all cities/towns, to assess the actual demand for housing. This initial step involved generating enough awareness about the objectives of PMAY-U and its four verticals among the public so that interested and eligible applicants could make an informed decision and choose the PMAY-U vertical that best suited their housing requirement and circumstances. They were also made aware of the eligibility criteria and requirement of the documents necessary to be attached with their application.
This mandate for a demand survey is noteworthy and has resonated strongly with practitioners in the development sector. Demand validation was required to ensure that the ineligible applicants are screened out and that supply under each of the four verticals of PMAY-U, matches the demand. On the basis of the demand survey, usually conducted by an external consultant with the support of the Municipal Board/Town Committee, and other available data, urban local bodies (ULBs) prepared the Housing for All Plan of Action (HFAPoA) and detailed project reports (DPRs) containing the validated housing demand among eligible beneficiaries in the ULB area along with the distribution of this demand across the four verticals of the scheme.
Background
Demand surveys were particularly challenging in the northeast due to topographic challenges, widespread and inaccessible settlements and other planning challenges. As mandated in the Mission, the Government of Assam (GoA) had rolled out a demand survey in 2016 covering the top 9 towns of the state. However, several documentation and process related challenges faced by the state created bottlenecks in the implementation of the PMAY-U scheme. As a result, GoA was actively seeking a competent entity to help it understand the ground level challenges and, thereby, conceptualise and implement the demand survey in the 97 towns of the state.
Around the same time, Indian Housing Federation (IHF) was present in Assam, motivated by its ambition to make an impact in the low-income housing space. In early 2016, IHF was incubating Project Vivartan, a housing initiative of Mushroom Development Foundation (MDF) in Guwahati. The project aimed to establish a housing facilitation practice in the city. It involved demand aggregation by using innovative technology tools and market aggregation to enable low-income communities to access affordable housing. Subsequently, it was realised that Assam had a significant potential for self-built incremental housing and that the best outcomes could be achieved by partnering with the state government to support the establishment of a PMAY-U Mission in the state. With the state government already seeking a relevant organisation with relevant contextual experience, IHF was invited onboard to facilitate strategic planning for the Mission and help strategise the demand survey for Assam.
Through years of field engagements in various states, IHF has built an in-depth understanding of the national canvas of housing and pursues activities which have the potential to bring about systemic change. To anchor this role as an ecosystem enabler/facilitator, IHF assists state governments in identifying and acknowledging the gaps between planned government schemes for low-income housing and their actual implementation. IHF believes that PMAY-U State Missions create fertile beds for scaling innovations in technologies, processes, and partnership models that can make a significant impact in the sector, particularly for low-income communities.
Hence, IHF took this opportunity in Assam to assist the state government in addressing the gaps in implementation of a statewide demand assessment survey and determining the best model for the same through a proof of concept. Following this, IHF was given the mandate by GoA to demonstrate a pilot demand survey in the mid-sized town of Morigaon.
The Stage
Morigaon is administered by Morigaon Municipal Board and has a population of 29,164 people as per the 2011 Census. The population in 2016 was estimated to be around 40,000. The demographic makeup of the town is heterogeneous.
The IHF team took the charge of conducting a pilot to assess the demand across the four verticals of PMAY-U in Morigaon. In order to do this, the team had to build a robust model for comprehensive data collection coupled with drawing field insights that would give direction for designing the future survey strategy of the state.
The following principles informed the pilot design:
Equal opportunity – Present the opportunity to become part of the survey to every willing and eligible household .
Evidence based – Adhere to the eligibility criteria of identifying potential beneficiaries as per the Mission guidelines and ensure efficient collection of required documents.
Bridge information gaps – Educate communities on: the mission objectives and provisions; the eligibility criteria and availability of options; and documentation requirements.
Technology – Demonstrate the merits of leveraging technology-based solutions.
Collaboration – Forge partnerships to strengthen an enabling ecosystem for low-income housing in the town.
The Preparation
The pilot was conducted meticulously and involved the following preparatory steps:
The policy provisions were simplified for better understanding by the communities as well as the local extended team. The matrix shown below is one such attempt at decoding the policy.
2. Based on the categories identified above, a checklist of required documents was created for each vertical. The checklist prepared in Assamese is shown below.
3. A front-end team of surveyors was put together by collaborating with volunteers from local NGOs, interested citizens and students enrolled in the Masters in Social Work programme offered at higher education institutions.
4. Taking inspiration from the application formats (4A and 4B) as given in Mission guidelines, the survey forms were customised, digitised and made available on mobile tablet devices.
5. The team was trained in conducting surveys efficiently by using Lumstic, an in-house survey tool, on mobile tablet devices and in carrying out the survey process and field engagement.
6. A workshop on PMAY-U for the ULB staff and ward councillors was conducted to familiarise them with the Mission and highlight the importance of their role in the Mission.
The Process: Trial and Error
Designing the pilot was an evolutionary and exploratory process where learnings from each iteration helped to inform the next. IHF experimented with three approaches over the entire course of the demand survey to arrive at the most robust approach. IHF wanted to make the most out of the given opportunity and demonstrate for the state a pilot that can be replicated and upscaled by formulating a pan-Assam strategy for conducting surveys and implementing the PMAY-U scheme.
All the three approaches involved a different combination of the mode of communication used and the methodology for data collection. The approaches were assessed on the following parameters:
Beneficiary Effort – should be as low as possible.
Resource Efficiency – should utilise the resources (effort, time, materials) most efficiently.
Degree of Awareness – should create maximum awareness.
Throughput (form collection) – should ensure maximum submission of application forms.
A synthesis of the tried survey methodologies has been illustrated below:
The Challenges
The two-and-a-half-month exercise of conducting the pilot was replete with challenges. The team experienced different constraints related to the informality of records and typical challenges of working with/ from within the government machinery.
Obtaining adequate documentation
The foremost challenge was the lack of registered, updated and consistent land ownership documentation with the beneficiaries. Since more than half the town could be categorised under the BLC component, proving the applicant’s land ownership was mandatory as per the Mission guidelines. Majority of the potential beneficiaries did not have complete documents. This obstacle was overcome by emphasising the requirement of four mandatory documents - Voter ID, bank passbook, property tax receipt and Jamabandi (land ownership document). The verification of these documents ensured successful enrollment of a beneficiary into the scheme while also flagging the cases involving lack of land ownership (inherited/non-partitioned).
Creating sufficient awareness
The second critical challenge was to achieve the desired level of awareness and involvement of the ULB staff and the elected ward councillors by assigning clear roles and responsibilities. As per the Mission guidelines, implementation at the local level is the ULB’s responsibility and ward councillors play a significant role in it. Their involvement in the implementation could shape the outcome of the mission at the respective ward levels. Being people’s representatives, ward councillors have ground-level knowledge and they could play a vital role in bridging information gaps, ensuring the survey coverage in their respective wards and voicing concerns on behalf of the potential beneficiaries. By encouraging active support from the ward councillors, the awareness campaign was much more effective and efficient. In Morigaon, the councillors were involved and supported several activities in the process of conducting the pilot.
Ensuring accurate communication
The third challenge was information dissemination and management of beneficiary expectations, which was achieved by simplifying the policy provisions as an attempt to communicate the same in easy-to-understand terms without compromising on accuracy. In some earlier instances, people had been misled into thinking that they are entitled to free houses under the BLC vertical. Some households were unaware of the individual contribution amount that they would be required to arrange. Some were skeptical about timelines as they had been victims of unfulfilled promises in the past. Such gaps in understanding influenced the beneficiaries’ expectations from the scheme. While some of these could be managed with some degree of pre-emption and cognizance, the challenge of skewed expectations persisted.
The Way Forward: Institutionalization of Processes
The primary objective of the pilot exercise was to explore aspects of the executed survey methodology that can be adopted to the pan-Assam survey process and to identify ways in which the ULB can be equipped and empowered to own the overall implementation of the scheme in their respective cities/towns. Hence, IHF focused on institutionalisation of processes and practices.
The beneficiary categorisation and document checklist conceptualised by IHF for the pilot, was eventually utilised under all marketing and awareness collateral created for the purposes of the Mission in Assam. After the experimentation with multiple approaches, as mentioned above, the officials overseeing the Mission were convinced that the demand survey must be done by the third approach using congregation, where an outbound team works for door-to-door awareness camps and an inbound team situated at the ward office is responsible for verifying the documents and registering the beneficiaries en masse. Surveys using tech-based tools, with its geo-tagging capabilities, helped with the first authenticity check to ensure that the family owns a kutcha house. This process served an important role in collecting, using and leveraging data efficiently and effectively, before the Bhuvan App was later developed as an exclusive mobile application for the Mission for capturing and geo-tagging photos of beneficiary houses.
The Takeaways
IHF’s experience with a pilot demand survey in Morigaon, reiterates that a systematic and a well designed demand assessment is the premise for a suitable housing development under government schemes. IHF encourages the need for thorough demand assessments at regular intervals, independent of Missions and projects, by taking into consideration the entire housing continuum. The state housing policies should emphasise on data collection and establish systems and processes that will help in overcoming the challenges on an ongoing basis.