Ten million homes. That is the target sitting at the centre of PMAY-Urban 2.0 — the central government’s second-phase affordable housing mission that was launched in September 2024 and is running through 2029. With a total outlay of ₹2.30 lakh crore and central assistance of up to ₹2.50 lakh per family for EWS, LIG, and MIG beneficiaries, this is not a scheme. It is a structural demand event for every building material category that matters to the tile, sanitaryware, adhesive, and cement industries.
As of February 2026, over 13.61 lakh homes had already been sanctioned across 16 states and Union Territories. In the most recent sanction cycle alone — the 6th CSMC meeting in February 2026 — another 2.87 lakh homes were approved in a single sitting. In June 2026, 42,000 homes were sanctioned in Madhya Pradesh alone, where over 10 lakh homes have already been completed under PMAY-U and PMAY-U 2.0 combined. The pipeline is not theoretical. It is physical construction, happening right now, across hundreds of cities and towns.
Every single one of those homes needs tiles on the floor. Sanitaryware in the bathroom. Adhesive to fix the tiles. Cement or dry mix for the walls. The question is not whether this demand exists. The question is whether your brand is in the specification at the point where those decisions are being made — or whether you’ll be watching a competitor’s product go into 10 million homes while yours sits on the showroom shelf.
Understanding How Affordable Housing Procurement Actually Works
This is where most building material sales teams get it wrong. They treat government-linked housing projects the same way they treat private residential deals — waiting for a contractor to walk into the showroom or call the RSM when they’re ready to buy. That approach loses the opportunity before it begins.
PMAY-Urban 2.0 is implemented through four verticals: Beneficiary-Led Construction, where families build their own homes with government assistance; Affordable Housing in Partnership, where state governments and private developers build and allocate homes; Affordable Rental Housing, targeting workers and migrants; and the Interest Subsidy Scheme, which supports home loan borrowers. Each vertical has a different procurement structure, a different decision-maker, and therefore a different entry point for a building material brand.
In the Beneficiary-Led Construction vertical — which accounts for a significant portion of BLC homes — the actual material purchase decision is made by the individual family, often guided by a mason, contractor, or local dealer. This is your retail and dealer network play. The family has a fixed budget, is extremely cost-sensitive, and will buy whatever their trusted mason recommends. If your brand isn’t known to and recommended by the masons in the markets where BLC construction is happening, you simply don’t exist in that decision.
In the Affordable Housing in Partnership vertical — where developers build large blocks of homes in partnership with state housing boards — the procurement decision moves up to the developer’s purchase team, often influenced by a project architect or technical specification consultant. This is your project sales play. Specification decisions here are made months before a single tile is ordered. If your brand is not in the approved vendor list or the architect’s preferred specification at the design stage, you won’t get a look-in at the procurement stage regardless of price.
Understanding which vertical is dominant in each of your key markets is the starting point for any meaningful PMAY strategy. It determines who you need to reach, what conversation you need to have, and how far in advance you need to be having it.
The Specification Window — And Why It’s Already Open
Here is the reality of how building material specification works in government-linked affordable housing: by the time a project goes to tender, the key material decisions have almost always already been made. The architect or consultant who prepared the project DPR — the detailed project report that state housing boards submit for central approval — has already written in floor tile specifications, bathroom fixture categories, adhesive types, and plaster mix requirements. Changing those specifications after DPR approval is possible but uncommon and administratively cumbersome.
The specification window is the period during which a building material brand can legitimately influence what goes into those documents. For a project sanctioned in early 2026, that window may have already partially closed. For the next wave of sanctions — and with PMAY-U 2.0 targeting 1 crore homes over five years, there will be many more waves — the window is open right now.
What does working the specification window look like in practice? It means your project sales team identifying which state housing boards, urban local bodies, and private developers are preparing DPRs or project specifications in your geography. It means getting samples, technical data sheets, and compliance documentation — BIS certification, relevant IS standards — into the hands of the architects and consultants who are writing those specs. It means visiting state housing board technical teams, not with a rate card, but with a product solution that demonstrates why your tile or adhesive meets the technical requirements of affordable housing construction — durability, slip resistance, water absorption, ease of installation at scale.
It also means being realistic about price positioning. PMAY projects operate on fixed per-unit costs with tight material budgets. The specification needs to deliver quality within those cost constraints. A brand that insists on premium pricing in an affordable housing specification conversation is wasting everyone’s time. The brands that win PMAY volume are the ones that have a product range specifically suited to the affordable segment — good quality, BIS-compliant, reliably available at scale, and priced competitively within the category.
Mason and Contractor Networks – Your Most Underused Asset
For the BLC vertical and for self-build construction that is happening parallel to PMAY-funded projects, the mason is the most influential person in the material decision chain. Not the dealer. Not the architect. The mason.
An individual family building their own home in a Tier 3 town in Odisha or a semi-urban locality in Telangana does not typically walk into a showroom and choose tiles from a catalogue. They ask their mason what to use. The mason tells them what they know, what they’ve used before, and what they can get from the local dealer who gives them a commission or goodwill. If your brand has not invested in mason relationships in these markets — product demonstrations, certification programmes, site visits, WhatsApp groups with mason community leaders — you are not competing in the BLC segment regardless of how good your product is.
The good news is that this is one of the most practical and cost-effective sales investments available. A mason training day in a small town, covering correct tile fixing techniques with your adhesive and tile product, costs relatively little and creates a recommendation engine that works on every project that mason touches for the next two years. PMAY construction is happening in precisely the kinds of markets where organised brand penetration has historically been thin — which means the competition for mason mindshare is lower, and the impact of getting there first is higher.
What Your Sales Team Needs to Do Differently
Most tile, adhesive, and sanitaryware sales teams are structured and incentivised around dealer billing. Their beat plans cover showrooms. Their targets are measured in monthly dispatches. None of that is wrong for the retail market. But it is fundamentally misaligned with how PMAY-linked volume is won.
Capturing PMAY opportunity requires a parallel sales effort with different metrics, different relationships, and a longer conversion cycle. Here is what that looks like in concrete terms.
Map the PMAY construction activity in your key markets. State-wise sanctioned home data is available on the PMAY-Urban dashboard. Your RSMs should know which districts in their territory have the highest number of sanctioned homes currently under construction, who the implementing agency is, and which developer or contractor is doing the actual building work.
Build a project specification team, even if it is small. One or two people whose job is to engage with architects, state housing board consultants, and developer purchase teams — not to take orders, but to get brands into specifications — can deliver more long-term volume than ten RSMs chasing dealer billing.
Create an affordable housing product bundle. For each PMAY project category, prepare a recommended package — floor tile, wall tile, bathroom tile, adhesive, grout, basic sanitaryware — that is BIS-compliant, priced for the affordable segment, and available at consistent supply. Project developers and contractors do not want to source each item separately from five different brands. A single-source solution that covers the essentials, competitively priced, and backed by technical support is a genuine competitive advantage.
Get into the mason ecosystem before your competitors do. Identify the five most active mason communities in each of your key PMAY markets. Start the relationship now — not when the project is already under construction.
The Volume That Lasts Years
PMAY-Urban 2.0 is a five-year programme. The homes being sanctioned today will be under construction and fitted with tiles, bathroom fittings, and adhesives over the next two to four years. The brands that get into the specification and the mason recommendation network in 2026 will be collecting volume from that investment through 2028 and 2029.
That is not a guarantee — government programmes move at their own pace, sanctions don’t always translate linearly into construction timelines, and budget releases have historically been uneven. But the direction is unambiguous. With ₹54,232 crore allocated by the central government for PMAY-U in FY26 alone, and with the “Angikaar 2026” campaign actively driving sanction and completion velocity across 5,000 urban local bodies, the machine is moving.
The brands that are in those homes when they’re built will have earned it — by showing up at the specification stage, building mason relationships in markets others ignored, and structuring their product offering around what affordable housing projects actually need.
The ones that aren’t will be watching from the showroom.
References
- IBEF — PMAY Scheme Overview — https://www.ibef.org/government-schemes/pradhan-mantri-awas-yojana
- Construction World — PMAY-U 2.0 Madhya Pradesh Sanctions — https://www.constructionworld.in/policy-updates-and-economic-news/pmay-u-2.0-sanctions-over-42000-houses-in-madhya-pradesh/93346
- PMAY Urban Official Portal — https://pmay-urban.gov.in
- PRS Legislative Research — Demand for Grants 2026–27 Housing Analysis — https://prsindia.org/files/budget/budget_parliament/2026/DfG_Analysis_2026-27-Housing.pdf
- Market Research Outlook — India Sanitary Ware Market 2026 — https://marketresearchoutlook.com/research-report/india-sanitary-ware-market
- IIFL Home Finance — PMAY Urban 2.0 Explained — https://www.iiflhomeloans.com/blogs/pmay-2-0-affordable-housing-scheme
- IMARC Group — India Ceramic Tiles Market — https://www.imarcgroup.com/india-ceramic-tiles-market
