LIFE Mission (Livelihood Inclusion and Financial Empowerment) Housing Scheme

What is the LIFE Mission housing scheme?

LIFE Mission; Livelihood Inclusion and Financial Empowerment, known in Malayalam as the Sampoorna Paarppida Suraksha Padhathi: is the Government of Kerala's flagship housing scheme, implemented through the Local Self Government Department with a state-level housing mission chaired by the Chief Minister and co-chaired by the Minister for Local Self Government.

LIFE Mission does one thing that earlier housing schemes did not: it converges. Instead of running as a separate programme, LIFE pools the state and central housing schemes already flowing through different departments; PMAY Urban, PMAY Gramin, Scheduled Caste Development, Scheduled Tribe Development and the Fisheries Department, and tops up the difference in unit cost from mission funds so that a beneficiary receives one consistent amount whichever scheme technically funds the house.

The mission statement on the official portal is that every landless and homeless family in Kerala should get a safe and dignified house that also lets the family earn a living, take part in social life with dignity, and access every social welfare service including financial services. The Local Self Government Department describes the original target as safe housing for roughly 4.30 lakh homeless people in the state over five years, of whom about 1.60 lakh were landless families historically left out of earlier housing schemes.

LIFE Mission runs in phases. Phase 1 completed the houses of families who had received assistance under earlier schemes between 2000-01 and 2015-16 but could not finish construction. Phase 2 covers homeless families who own land. Phase 3 covers landless homeless families, who are rehabilitated in housing complexes rather than through individual grants.

Who is eligible for a LIFE Mission house?

LIFE Mission recognises four beneficiary groups, as listed on the official portal:

• Homeless families that own land.
• Families whose house construction was never completed, or whose house is not fit to live in.
• Families living in temporary shelters on government puramboke land, in coastal areas or in plantation areas.
• Landless and homeless families.

The eligibility conditions published on the LIFE registration portal are specific:

• Everyone on one ration card is one family, considered for one house only, and no member of that card may already own a house. This condition is not applied to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and fisher families.
• The family's annual income must not exceed Rs 3 lakh.
• The family must not own more than 25 cents of land in a grama panchayat, or more than 5 cents in a municipality or corporation. Again, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and fisher families are exempt from this condition.
• A house is treated as unliveable if it has walls of mud, stone, tarpaulin, sheet or wood and a roof of sheet or thatch. The local body engineer certifies this when the implementing officer asks for it.

For the landless category, three further tests apply: the applicant owns no land; no member named on the ration card owns land; and the total land held by all members on the card together is less than 3 cents.

Who cannot apply

• Families with a permanent employee or pensioner of a government, semi-government or public sector institution are not eligible.
• Families with an annual income above Rs 3 lakh are not eligible.
• Families owning a four-wheeler that is not a means of livelihood are excluded.
• Parents who have already partitioned and transferred their property to their children and thereby become technically landless cannot apply, and children whose parents hold property that is unlikely to be partitioned soon are also not considered.
• Land locked in litigation cannot be counted; such cases are considered only after the case ends.
• People who built a house on their own without government assistance and left it unfinished are not assisted; the local body is expected to help complete such houses through public fundraising.

How much assistance does LIFE Mission pay?

According to the LIFE Mission FAQ, the mission meeting of 5 April 2017 fixed individual house assistance as follows:

• Rs 3.5 lakh for general category beneficiaries.
• Rs 4 lakh for Scheduled Caste families, fisher families and plantation workers.
• Actual construction cost for Scheduled Tribe families.

The same FAQ records that discussions were under way to raise the general rate to Rs 4 lakh, and it notes the mission's decision to equalise the unit cost, where a converged scheme such as PMAY pays less than the LIFE rate, LIFE Mission funds the difference. Anyone budgeting a house should confirm the current rate with the local body, because the unit cost has been revised by government order more than once since 2017.

Assistance is not paid as a lump sum. It is released in instalments tied to construction stages, each verified by the local body's engineer, and the beneficiary signs an agreement with the local self government institution before the first instalment. Phase 2 beneficiaries also get building materials — cement, paint, electrical and sanitary fittings, wiring accessories and water tanks, at 40 to 60 per cent below market rates under tie-ups the mission arranged with major brands.

Landless homeless families in Phase 3 do not receive cash. They are allotted a flat in a LIFE housing complex. The mission has targeted 101 housing complexes, of which 14 are being built as care homes, and the first completed complex at Adimali was handed over to 163 beneficiaries of the Adimali grama panchayat.

How to apply for a LIFE Mission house

LIFE Mission is a survey-driven scheme. The normal path is selection, not application.

1. Get counted in the survey. Trained Kudumbashree workers conduct the household survey using the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census landless-homeless list and the local body's own housing lists as indicators. In tribal areas ST promoters do the survey where Kudumbashree workers are unavailable. Families in none of the source lists are identified directly by Kudumbashree.
2. Cooperate with field verification. Village Extension Officers in rural areas and Junior Health Inspectors in urban areas re-check the survey forms, and 10 per cent of forms are randomly picked for supervisory checking.
3. Check the draft list. The local body publishes the ward-wise draft list in Malayalam: serial number, survey code, head of family, address, ration or Aadhaar number and distress factors: in its office and website, the Kudumbashree ADS and district mission offices, the district collectorate, anganwadis, village offices, health centres, ration shops and other major government offices in the area.
4. File an objection if you are left out or wrongly marked ineligible. No printed form exists. A plain-paper application with all details, submitted to the secretary of the local self government institution, is enough. The secretary has the power to add eligible landless-homeless families who were missed.
5. Register online when the mission opens a window. LIFE Mission has run dedicated registration portals for families left out of the original list, the LIFE 2020 portal, whose last window closed on 20 February 2021, allowed one registration and one application per mobile number, with OTP verification, followed by upload of ration card, Aadhaar, caste certificate, Village Officer's income certificate, distress-factor certificates and, for landless applicants, the Village Officer's landlessness certificate.
6. Sign the agreement and start construction. Once the final list is approved and your name is included, execute the agreement with the local body, and draw the assistance instalment by instalment as the engineer certifies each stage.

Who gets priority?

Where more families are eligible than there are houses, LIFE Mission ranks them by the number of distress factors, most first. Where the count is equal, the published order of preference is: persons with mental illness, blindness or paralysis; destitute families; persons with more than 40 per cent disability; transgender persons; people with serious or terminal illness such as cancer, heart disease, dialysis-dependent kidney failure or stroke; unmarried mothers; families whose head cannot earn because of illness or accident; and widows. Widows with sons above 25 years of age are not counted in the last category.

How to check your status and what the numbers look like

Beneficiary lists are published on the LIFE Mission website, the local self government institution's website and the LSGD portal, and copies are available at the local body office, the district mission office, the Kudumbashree district mission coordinator's office, the Kudumbashree CDS office and village offices. Construction progress for Phase 1 and Phase 2 is published on the mission's MIS dashboard at lifemissionmis.kerala.gov.in.

On the official record, Phase 1 completed 52,455 of 54,122 houses (96.92 per cent) with Rs 680.72 crore disbursed to beneficiaries. In Phase 2, of 1,77,972 beneficiaries approved through the gramasabha survey, 1,03,124 cleared document verification and 87,495 (88.98 per cent) finished construction. In Phase 3, 3,37,416 families were surveyed, 2,29,310 appeared for eligibility verification and 1,35,769 were found eligible. Across all converged schemes the Local Self Government Department reports 2,50,131 houses completed at a cost of Rs 8,461 crore, and LIFE Mission has since announced the completion of five lakh houses.

Why LIFE Mission applications get rejected

• Income certificate above Rs 3 lakh, or a certificate that does not match the survey declaration.
• Land holding above the ceiling; more than 25 cents in a panchayat or 5 cents in a municipality or corporation.
• A government employee or pensioner on the same ration card.
• Property transferred to children before applying, which does not create eligibility as a landless family.
• Two families claimed on one ration card, which the current rules do not allow.
• Litigated land or land without building permission. Wetland cases need DLAC permission obtained panchayat-wise, and land recorded as nilam under the Kerala Land Utilisation Order needs a specific order from the RDO on an application by the panchayat committee.
• Clerical or data-entry errors in the survey form. These are correctable, but only at the appeal stage.

Help and contact

LIFE Mission, Navakeralam Karmapadhathi, BSNL Bhavan, 3rd Floor, Uppalam Road, Statue, Thiruvananthapuram – 695 001. Telephone 0471 2335524. Email lifemissionkerala@gmail.com. The LIFE 2020 registration portal published a technical helpdesk number, 0471-2784139, for problems with online registration. For anything to do with your name on the list, the first stop is the secretary of your grama panchayat, municipality or corporation, followed by the district LIFE Mission office; unresolved grievances can be taken to the Ombudsman for Local Self Government Institutions.