Whose name is on the house?
India runs one of the world's largest transfers of housing to women — its flagship scheme puts homes in women's names by mandate. Yet most Indian women still don't own the home they live in. A look at the distance between a name on an allotment letter and a woman who owns her house.
The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) does something unusual for a government programme: it requires the house it builds to be owned by a woman. Under both the urban and rural arms, a PMAY home must be in the name of the female head of household, or jointly in the names of husband and wife — a male-only title is the narrow exception. It is, on paper, one of the largest deliberate transfers of property to women anywhere.
And the scheme's own numbers look triumphant. Under the latest urban phase, about 97% of houses were sanctioned to women, sole or joint; under the rural arm, roughly 73% of completed houses have a woman owner. Set those beside what the National Family Health Survey finds about women in general, though, and a gap opens up.
The scheme reports up to 97% of its homes in women's names. But nationally, only 42% of women own a house at all, and just 13% own one in their sole name — the rest is joint ownership. The mandate is real, but it leans heavily on joint titles and sits atop a country where sole ownership by women is still rare.
The mandate meets the baseline
Read the scheme numbers and the survey numbers together and the shape of the gap is clear. PMAY can allot almost every one of its houses to a woman; but PMAY reaches only poor, eligible households, and it counts a joint title — the house in the names of husband and wife — as "women's ownership." Across all women, sole ownership is the exception, not the rule.
View data table
| Measure | Share |
|---|---|
| PMAY-Urban 2.0 — sanctioned to women (sole/joint) | 97% |
| PMAY-Gramin — completed with a woman owner (sole/joint) | 73% |
| All women — own a house (alone or jointly) | 42.3% |
| All women — own a house in sole name | 13% |
House, land, farmland — the gap widens
Home ownership is where women come closest to men; on land and farmland the distance grows. NFHS-5 finds 42.3% of women own a house against 62.5% of men, and 31.7% own land against 43.9% of men. And when you get to agricultural land specifically, women are under 14% of operational holders — and "operating" a holding overstates owning it.
View data table
| Asset (owns, alone or jointly) | Women | Men |
|---|---|---|
| A house | 42.3% | 62.5% |
| Land | 31.7% | 43.9% |
A wide spread across states
Women's ownership varies enormously by state, and not always in the direction a development map would predict. Karnataka, Telangana, and Punjab record well over 60% of women owning a house or land; Maharashtra and Tripura sit below 25%. Between the two survey rounds, ownership actually fell in roughly half the large states — a pattern analysts treat with caution, since asset questions are notoriously sensitive to how they are asked.
View data table
| State / UT | Own house and/or land |
|---|---|
| Ladakh | 72.2% |
| Karnataka | 67.6% |
| Telangana | 66.6% |
| Punjab | 63.5% |
| Uttar Pradesh | 51.9% |
| National average | 43.3% |
| Gujarat | 42.6% |
| Maharashtra | 22.9% |
| Tripura | 17.2% |
What this data can and can't tell you
- Sole is not the same as joint. The scheme's headline "women's ownership" bundles joint titles (husband and wife) with sole female ownership. The sole-female share is far smaller — about 27% of PMAY-Gramin houses, and 13% of all women. Any honest reading keeps the two apart.
- A title is not control. A name on an allotment letter or sale deed is not the same as effective say over the asset. The urban scheme even allows the woman's name to be added at a "later stage" — a known compliance gap.
- The scheme and the survey count different people. PMAY reaches only poor, eligible households; NFHS samples all women. You cannot subtract one from the other — read them as mandate vs baseline, not as a before-and-after.
- The state numbers are a verified subset, and ownership fell in about half the large states between survey rounds — a trend analysts flag as partly a data-comparability artefact, not necessarily real decline.
- Operating land is not owning it. The 14% female-holder figure counts who operates agricultural land; titled ownership by women is lower still.
The defensible claim: a genuine, large-scale mandate to put homes in women's names coexists with a country where most women own no house in their own right. The scheme is moving the number — but from a very low base, and largely through joint titles. Whether a name on a deed becomes real control is the question the ownership statistics can't answer.
- Ministry of Rural Development & Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs — PMAY women-ownership figures (2024).
- National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21) — women's house and land ownership; UNFPA analysis of the NFHS asset data.
- Agriculture Census 2015-16, Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare — female operational holders.
ImpactMojo Data (2026). "Whose name is on the house?" ImpactMojo Data Dives. Retrieved from https://impactmojo.in/DataDives/whose-name-on-the-house.html
Have a dataset worth digging into?
Data Dives are independent investigations built from public data. If you know a number that deserves a closer look, tell us.
Pitch a Data Dive →