Chandigarh: The Punjab Council of Ministers (CoM), led by Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, on Friday gave the go-ahead for 'The Punjab Shehri Awas Yojana-2017' to provide free housing to eligible houseless SC/BC urban families.

Chandigarh: The Punjab Council of Ministers (CoM), led by Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, on Friday gave the go-ahead for 'The Punjab Shehri Awas Yojana-2017' to provide free housing to eligible houseless SC/BC urban families.

Urban households with an annual income of less than Rs. 3 lac in the first phase and Rs.5 lac in the second phase would be eligible to claim free housing facility under the scheme, being launched to implement a major poll promise of the Congress government.

The Chief Minister, however, gave strict instructions to the concerned departments to ensure that utmost care is taken to ensure that the scheme impacts the real beneficiaries. Often the true beneficiaries fail to get the benefit of social welfare schemes due to errors of inclusion (where the wrong persons end up getting included in the list) or errors of exclusion (the real beneficiaries remain out of the ambit, usually lacking even awareness of the schemes), he observed, adding that extreme care should be taken to avoid such errors.