The development objective of the Low Income Housing Finance Project for India is to provide access to sustainable housing finance for low income households, to purchase, build or upgrade their dwellings. The project has three components.

1. The first component is capacity building. Under this component activities will be financed to strengthen the capacity of National Housing Bank (NHB), qualified intermediary institutions, and Qualified Primary Lending Institutions (QPLIs). The aim will be to develop new financial products, loan standards, risk management tools, and financial literacy and consumer protection capacity. In addition, pilots will be designed, launched and monitored. Building upon and complementing National Housing Bank (NHB’s) monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems and processes, this component will also support an impact assessment to independently assess the social and household level impact of the project.
2. The second component is financial support for sustainable and affordable housing. This component will finance NHB to refinance, directly or indirectly through qualified intermediary institutions, low-income housing loans made by QPLIs to primary borrowers to purchase, build or upgrade their dwelling. NHB has recently prepared a refinancing scheme for secured low-income housing loans to borrowers with formal and informal incomes. NHB will develop guidelines (to be formulated and reflected in the project’s operations manual) for the provision of alternatively secured housing loans to formal and informal borrowers.
3. The third component is project implementation. A Project Implementation Unit (PIU) will be set up within NHB to help implement the project, carry out monitoring and evaluation, be responsible for legal issues and grievance redressal, overseeing and monitoring the social and environmental due diligence (including conducting annual third party audits of QPLIs), keeping the project’s operations manual updated, and financial management and carry out any procurement necessary under the project. Low-income housing expertise will also be added to the PIU to provide technical inputs to the procurement of consultants’ services under component one. External communications on the project will also be covered by NHB staff. Lastly, NHB will also take on responsibility for dissemination and communication activities under its own budget, such as conferences or workshops.