The Union Budget 2017 will provide tremendous impetus to the housing sector, said Deepak Parekh, chairman of Housing Development Finance Corporation Ltd.
The housing sector has a multiplier effect, explained Parekh, which impacts a number of core industries such as steel and cement.
In a move to give affordable housing a further boost, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech proposed to give ‘infrastructure' status to this segment. ‘Infrastructure' status for affordable housing, in fact, has been a long-pending demand of the real estate sector.
The finance minister allocated Rs 23,000 crore to the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana, and set a target of building one crore houses by 2019.
Parekh also lauded the government's emphasis on the rural and farm sectors, “Overall, the allocation and emphasis on the rural setor and the farm sector has been much more than in the past and rightly so...We need to increase our food grain production, we need to have rural development."
Budget 2017, all in all, has been an “excellent”, Parekh concluded.
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