Half the Money, Half the Work, Full Page Ads: The anatomy of Modi’s flagship schemes

On paper, in the government’s telling, the flagship schemes are rounding the final corner and metrics are awe inspiring. But look deeper and the story sags — targets remain distant, funds are stuck mid-route, and the technocratic integrated digital gateway billed as a reform has become a bottleneck. New schemes debut with applause, only to freeze at the planning stage with budgets parked without utilisation. Through it all, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) under which some of the schemes were or are being rolled out maintains everything is in order. The confidence is striking; the results less so.

This in a nutshell is a report card of the six flagship schemes and the new ones rolled out with great fanfare and at the expense of the tax payers’ money. It all started with a bang and appears, to be ending with a whimper. The report card is not one prepared by the Opposition or the critics of the government. The report card is in the government’s paperwork, the standing committees it has set up, its answers in the Parliament and where available for public scrutiny, in the details flagged by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) reports. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

According to the latest report of the Standing Parliamentary Committee panel headed by the Telegu Desam Party MP, Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy, the assessment of the six schemes over nearly last 10 years shows that roughly less than 50 per of Rs 36.5 K Cr allocated funds have been utilised.

The Swachch Bharat or Clean India Mission intended to remove the garbage from the streets and make India Open Defection Free (ODF), The Smart City Project in which 100 cities across the nation, AMRUT or the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation & Urban Transformation, intended for upgradation of water, sewage and draining, The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna (PMAY), with the ambitious exhortation of “housing for all”, The National Urban Livelihood Mission, started with the intention of skilling youth, And the Heritage City Development & Augmentation Yojna.

What accounts for the non-utilisation of funds? The Parliamentary panel report does not answer the question directly. At first, it points to a larger picture.  It says for instance that “individual schemes cannot serve as a roadmap of infrastructural development required in various verticals of urban living commensurate with the ambitious goal of Viksit Bharat by 2047.” In other words, hashtag “Viksit Bharat 2047” cannot be achieved by tagging disparate schemes to it. That’s not planning, it’s an exercise in aggregation without coherence. 

If you think about it, that’s a damning observation to make for a Parliamentary panel headed by an NDA ally. But let’s return to the non-utilisation of funds for the schemes and the Ministry’s statement.

In one instance, the blame is put on the states, in another on the beneficiary. In the case of the PMAY scheme the Ministry blames the states for non-utilisation of Union funds, saying they are awaiting “complete proposals” from the states.  The states on their part, as has been documented elsewhere, have accused the Centre of not releasing the funds on one pretext or the other. This has been noted in the case of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala to mention a few.

In another instance, under the section of affordable housing for poor, also part of the PMAY scheme, the underspending is explained in terms of external factors or obstinacy/absence of the intended beneficiaries. For example, the report quoting the Ministry states that identified land is disputed or under encroachment or pending NOC from other departments. That beneficiaries have migrated, are not willing to relocate or do not accept multi-storeyed buildings.

The poor planning and unrealistic proposals also find their mention in the CAG reports with damning consistency. The 2024-2025 CAG report on Patna Smart City Limited (PSCL) for instance, found that of the 44 approved projects 29 had not even started because they were “not feasible” due to lack of land, overlap with other agencies’ work or were simply unworkable (for e.g., roof-top farming in densely built zones).

While unspent allocations capture just one facet of how poorly schemes are implemented and targets met, the rush to announce new programmes exposes a deeper, and increasingly visible, pattern in the government’s operating style. It’s not just that feasibility reports are not executed, worse, the government, it would appear, is rather nonchalant about it.

Take the case of new schemes under the MoHUA. The Parliamentary panel asks the Ministry for instance, why new schemes such “Urban Challenge Fund” (to develop Tier 2 &3 cities as growth hubs) and “Scheme for Industrial Housing” (construction of rental housing for industrial workers, working women, urban migrants, homeless, urban poor etc) announced in the Budget 2025-26 with a provision of Rs 10,000 Cr and Rs 2,500 Cr have been launched without clearance from the Cabinet.

“It is learnt” it notes dryly, “that the mode and method for selection of cities under Urban Challenge Fund is still under examination by the Ministry” and that the “Scheme for Industrial Housing” is yet to be designed. In other words, no stakeholder consultations, no feasibility studies or even a preliminary blueprint. One could say, it’s a case of jump first, think later.

It’s a familiar loop, replayed ad nauseam. While, the Parliamentary panel may avoid probing the government’s tall claims and demand accountability for the non-planning, the disclosures in Parliament paint a different picture. Responding to a Lok Sabha question on 24 July 2025, Minister of State for Jal Shakti V. Somanna conceded that community toilets constructed under Swachch Bharat scheme continue to suffer from poor maintenance and that construction often proceeds without ensuring water connections or proper drainage for faecal matter.

To complicate matters the recent introduction of new digital payment platform, SNASparsh (Just-in-time) adopted by the Finance Ministry in August 2024, means that funds allocated under various schemes have now been consolidated to prevent according to the finance ministry, “unproductive parking of funds”. The delay in adopting the mechanism by the states and stakeholders, incidentally, is quoted as one of the reasons for unspent funds in the panel report. Earlier, centrally sponsored scheme funds were routed through the state exchequer, allowing departments to access their share more readily.

Now, though touted as transparent, the new system has introduced another level of opacity to government functioning. On an average it takes more than 15 days for funds to be transferred to SNA after receiving central approval and matching the state share. This procedural delay, coupled with the fact that new system’s portal is still under development by the treasury directorate, has created significant implementation hurdles. The recent case of Haryana where 600 private hospitals temporarily suspended services under the Ayushman Bharat scheme, illustrates the fragility of outcomes when payment timelines falter. Imagine, the anxiety when faced with the daunting task of uploading and seeking approval of payment, in a country where internet access is either patchy or simply, absent.

Meanwhile in August this year, the Trinamool Congress flagged that there was 84 per cent increase in Union government’s expenditure on advertisement of centrally sponsored schemes between 2020 and 2025. The figures available on the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) website show that the Modi government spent Rs 349.24 Cr in 2020-21 which rose to almost double, Rs 643.63 Cr in 2024-25.

The numbers indicate a widening gap where publicity is getting priority over performance. And while images of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi are ubiquitous across campaigns, the promised outcomes are getting harder to spot on the ground.

The image painted by the state of affairs reminds once of Mao’s Backyard Steel Furnaces, a campaign that was sold as a national leap into industrial modernity. Targets were fixed first, the mechanics of how to reach them were an afterthought. Local officials announced output figures that existed only in their ledgers, and Beijing applauded progress that never left the page. Beneath the rhetoric of transformation lay pits of molten scrap and forests cut down to feed fires that produced metal no factory could use.

It’s not difficult to see the resemblance. Flagship schemes here debut with bravado – deadlines are declared, targets set, outcomes counted in ledgers – while the machinery needed to deliver them remains inadequate. The applause arrives on schedule; the implementation does not.