CAG Reports on UP and Chhattisgarh Highlight Broken Government Promises and Broken Homes
Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG’s) December 2025 audits puncture the so called success story of PM Awas Yojana in Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
Between 17 and 24 December 2025, two separate Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) performance audits on the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana—PMAY-Gramin in Uttar Pradesh and PMAY-Urban in Chhattisgarh—were tabled in the respective state legislatures and reported in detail in the press. Together, they turned an officially celebrated flagship scheme into a case study in overstatement, weak verification, and systemic lapses.
The Uttar Pradesh findings on PMAY-G, based on the CAG’s performance audit placed in the Vidhan Sabha and widely reported between 24 and 27 December 2025, cover the period from 2016–17 to 2022–23. The Chhattisgarh performance audit on PMAY-U, tabled around 16–17 December 2025, examines implementation in selected urban local bodies up to March 2023–24.
Uttar Pradesh PMAY-G: Completion Claims vs Reality
In Uttar Pradesh, the CAG records that 34.71 lakh houses were sanctioned under PMAY-G between 2016–17 and 2022–23, and that the state reported 34.18 lakh houses as completed by March 2024. Despite this near-total completion claim, the audit notes that 20,215 houses remained incomplete as of March 2025, even though scheme guidelines mandate completion within 12 months of sanction.
More damagingly, a joint physical verification of 2,079 houses shown as “completed” in the PMAY-G Management Information System (MIS) revealed that only 77 houses were actually complete on the ground. The CAG explicitly flags this as overstatement of progress and highlights a serious disconnect between reported and actual completion.
The audit further notes that many beneficiaries lacked toilets, electricity, or drinking-water connections, despite convergence with Swachh Bharat, electrification, and water schemes being integral to PMAY-G design. This undermines the scheme’s objective of providing liveable pucca houses with basic amenities. It also observes that trained masons were not mapped to individual houses and that demonstration houses were either not constructed or not built in accordance with Union ministry-recommended designs—shortcomings which, in the CAG’s assessment, compromised construction quality and beneficiary awareness.
Chhattisgarh PMAY-U— ineligible beneficiaries, double benefits, weak monitoring
The performance audit on PMAY-Urban in Chhattisgarh focuses on implementation in four urban local bodies—Raipur, Bilaspur, Korba, and Premnagar—and finds that basic eligibility and monitoring safeguards were routinely bypassed.
The CAG reports that 71 beneficiaries with annual incomes exceeding ₹3 lakh, above the prescribed PMAY-U ceiling, were selected and allotted houses under the Beneficiary-Led Construction (BLC) and Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP) verticals. It also finds that urban local bodies released ₹4.05 crore to 250 beneficiaries without verifying land ownership, in violation of scheme norms requiring clear land title or recognised tenure.
A critical systemic failure identified by the audit is the non-integration of PMAY-G and PMAY-U MIS platforms. Because the two databases are not linked, the CAG identified 99 beneficiaries who received assistance under both PMAY-G and PMAY-U, as well as 35 beneficiaries who had already availed benefits under the earlier Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP) but were again granted houses under PMAY-U’s BLC vertical. The audit concludes that these duplications violate the one-house-per-family principle and calls for urgent MIS integration and stronger checks at the sanction stage.
The audit also notes that PMAY-U’s gender-empowerment objective was only partially realised. Between 2016–17 and 2023–24, only around half of the houses in Chhattisgarh were sanctioned in women’s or joint names, falling short of scheme intent. It further documents irregular or incomplete geo-tagging of houses and delays in conducting social audits, weakening transparency and community oversight.
Fund misuse, eligibility failures, and risk of loss
While the CAG stops short of using the word “corruption,” the Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh findings, read together, point clearly to financial loss and misuse risks arising from ineligible beneficiaries and misreporting.
In Uttar Pradesh, the audit notes that ₹9.52 crore was released to 1,838 ineligible beneficiaries in test-checked districts due to weak verification, of which ₹2.62 crore remained unrecovered as of September 2024. The CAG links this to deficient scrutiny of socio-economic data and inadequate local verification. In Chhattisgarh, assistance of ₹4.05 crore was disbursed without proper land-title verification, creating the risk that public funds may not result in secure housing assets for intended beneficiaries.
The duplication of benefits—99 beneficiaries drawing assistance from both PMAY-G and PMAY-U, and 35 receiving repeat benefits after IHSDP allotments—represents a direct misallocation of scarce housing subsidies. These failures, enabled by non-linked MIS systems and the absence of automated checks, reveal a pattern in which weak data integration and oversight permit leakages even as official narratives emphasise high completion numbers.
A test of the government’s accountability claims
These December 2025 audits arrive in a political context where the Union government has repeatedly showcased PMAY as a flagship success, citing cumulative numbers of houses sanctioned and completed across rural and urban India. The CAG’s evidence from Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh does not dispute that large numbers of houses have been sanctioned and built; rather, it interrogates the quality, completeness, targeting, and integrity of that delivery.
The finding that only 77 of 2,079 “completed” rural houses examined in Uttar Pradesh were actually complete, that thousands of sanctioned houses remained unfinished well beyond deadlines, that ineligible and repeat beneficiaries received urban housing subsidies in Chhattisgarh, and that women’s ownership and convergence goals were only partially met together constitute a serious indictment of implementation and oversight.
By placing precise numbers and specific lapses on record, the CAG has framed a clear test for both state governments and the Union government: whether these findings will be treated as routine audit observations to be formally “noted” and filed away, or as evidence of systemic weaknesses demanding time-bound corrective action—recovery of wrongly paid funds, tighter beneficiary identification, MIS integration, and transparent reporting back to legislatures. The reports require no rhetorical embellishment to be politically significant; in the restrained language of audit, they already describe a flagship housing scheme whose delivery, at least in these two states, falls well short of the claims made in its name.
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For a deeper examination of how audit findings reveal structural weaknesses in flagship welfare programmes, see Apurva Roy Chatterjee’s earlier investigation in The AIDEM on the Comptroller and Auditor General’s performance audit of the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY). That report similarly documented gaps between official claims and ground realities, highlighting how weak verification, inadequate monitoring, and data inconsistencies undermine programme outcomes despite large headline expenditures. Click here to read.
