Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar’s civic housing scheme is running into a wall that has nothing to do with construction. Of 11,128 flats built under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) in the city, only 3,638 winners have confirmed their units so far, according to a Navarashtra report, with more than 7,400 units still waiting for takers. Demand for the flats is not the problem. Many lottery winners simply cannot get a bank to finance the balance after paying their 10% down payment.
Why the loans are falling through
Most PMAY applicants queued up roughly a decade ago, when the scheme opened, and are only now being allotted flats through the online lottery. In that gap, many crossed the 50-year mark, a threshold several banks treat as a red flag for a fresh long-tenure home loan. As one municipal official put it, banks weigh “income, CIBIL score, existing loans, age, collateral and guarantors” as a package, per Navarashtra. Economically weaker applicants, the very group PMAY targets, are the ones most likely to fail more than one of those tests at once. A separate Navbharat Live report lists the specific rejections cited by applicants: low CIBIL scores, no salary slips, and no formal proof of income. Those are common realities for daily-wage and informal-sector workers, the very population the scheme was designed to house.
On June 9, a group of beneficiaries led by Imran Ahmad Shaikh submitted a memorandum to the municipal commissioner asking the corporation to step in: either stand as guarantor on the loans, help route financing through the State Bank of India, or let families pay their share in monthly instalments of Rs 2,000–3,000 instead of a lump sum. They also asked for the required contribution to be cut from 10% to 5% for the poorest applicants, extra concessions for differently-abled beneficiaries, and a guarantee that names would not be struck off the list simply because a family could not pay immediately.
What it means for residents
Winning the PMAY lottery gets an allottee a flat number. It does not get them a loan; a bank still judges the application on its own lending criteria, with no obligation to treat a government housing allotment as proof of creditworthiness. That gap falls hardest on exactly the households PMAY exists to serve: workers without payslips, families with thin or damaged credit histories, and applicants who aged out of the younger-borrower bracket while waiting years for their number to come up. Municipal Commissioner Amol Yedge issued coordination directives on June 22 to help move stalled cases along, but neither report cites a public commitment from the corporation or any bank to actually change the underlying loan terms.
The civic body counts success in flats built. Banks count it in credit scores and salary slips. Until those two measures line up, more than 7,400 PMAY units in Sambhajinagar will likely stay empty.
Outlook
Watch for whether the municipal corporation follows through on any guarantor role or SBI-routed financing, and whether the installment and reduced-contribution demands find their way into a formal policy change. Until then, expect the vacancy count among Sambhajinagar’s PMAY stock to stay high, and more beneficiaries to come forward with the same complaint.
Sources: Navarashtra, Navbharat Live
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.