Urban housing in India

Introduction

Make Room! Make Room! is a 1966 science fiction novel written by Harry Harrison exploring the consequences of both unchecked population growth on society and the hoarding of resources by a wealthy minority. The author claims the idea came from an Indian whom he met after the war, in 1946, who told him ‘Overpopulation is the big problem coming up in the world’. India today is a perfect embodiment of the writer’s imagination. The country presents an intriguing housing conundrum, emerging from the population growth, which records 51 new births registered every minute and the challenges associated with housing them. Its positioning at the halfway house between modernity and tradition, formal and informal and globalisation and localisation ascribes new meanings to housing and its links to all forms of wealth creation and social status. These imaginings take place under abrupt beginnings or endings of policies; complex, landscapes of stakeholder interaction or (non)interaction and under the highly politicised and often arcane legislative universe. This context surfaces important questions about governance, power relations, paradoxes and contradictions that are typically under-explored within mainstream housing studies about India.

Very little has changed in the last seven decades of the country’s independence on the housing front. India still faces the daunting challenge of adequately housing its urban residents. With an urban population of 461 million in 2018 estimated to double by 2050 (UN, 2019, p. 43), the last official estimate of the requirement of urban housing indicated the need for 18.78 million units (GoI, 2012) with 96% of the need concentrated in the Lower Income Group (LIG) and the Economically Weaker Section (EWS).¹ Unofficial estimates, using a similar methodology of calculating housing need and extending out to include family expansion, obsolescence of existing stock and numbers of the homeless place the requirement much higher, at 29 million units in 2018. Coupled with a squeeze on the per-capita floor area of congested households from 111 sq ft in 2012 to 83 sq ft in 2018, housing need is not just about aspirations but signals the urgent need to address congestion (Roy & Meera, 2020). Importantly, congestion of living space has been the most dominant reason for the housing shortage, characteristic to EWS and LIG households.

No doubt, the housing issue in India is daunting, not just because of the sheer number of households/units involved but also because of India’s complexity, with urban areas ranging in size from over 15 million to a few thousand people, differing geographies of various states and their varying economic levels, as well as local settlement history and house-building practices, all of which point to the limitation of ‘one size-fits all’ policy solutions. Over the last seven decades, many attempts have been made by the postcolonial state to reduce the gap between the demand and supply of housing, both during its nationalist phase, 1947 to 1990 and its on-going neo-liberal phase, from 1991 to the present. From a provider of housing in the early decades after independence, to that of enabler and facilitator from the late 1980s, India’s housing policy has seen shifts that parallel that of many countries in the rest of Asia (Sengupta & Shaw, 2018). Since the 1990s, housing in India is delivered through the country’s multi-tiered governance system, where housing policy cascades from the Centre to the State and from the State to City governments or municipalities amidst a network of public, private and community-based organisations. As new governance evolves, there are challenges arising from institutional lock-ins, unequally powered stakeholders or individuals, and collective resistance to stakeholder influences creating new landscapes of market engagement and generating conflicts. The failure to scale up housing supply renders these efforts far less radical or transformative and more frictional than was first assumed (Sengupta, 2019). Moreover, housing stock created in the city peripheries, largely remains unoccupied, because of economic dislocation from the workplaces, which more often than not are in the city cores.

In India’s case, two developments characterise its housing trajectory since the 1990s; one, that post-liberalisation measures such as the increase in the availability of housing finance and incentives to the private sector have benefitted the middle- and upper-income groups. This has predominantly helped in the reduction of housing shortage in these income groups. In fact, Census 2011s count of housing stock and its uses indicates that a large percentage of urban housing units, owned by the better off, remain vacant, that is, locked up and unused. Several accounts of developer bias and upper-income invasion of low-income homes are available in literature throughout that period vis vis a recognition that acute urban housing is concentrated among the poor and lower income groups, in towns and cities of all sizes. By 2012, housing deficit in India was reported to be 18.78 million with 11 million vacant units (GoI, 2011) making housing inequalities related to housing condition and property wealth one of the most significant challenges faced by the country.

Secondly, to address this latter issue, the central government since 2005, launched major housing programmes with part funding for state and local level government on condition they follow its strict implementation guidelines. The balance funding must be raised from the private sector through public-private partnerships, own resources and some beneficiary discounts made available by public agencies. While other options do exist within the ambit of the programmes, the most favoured solution by the central government has been mass housing for the poor in large multi-storied buildings either in situ or in the periphery of the city/town.

Side by side and looming large in the recent and not so recent housing literature, emanating from different parts of the developing world, is the mismatch between people’s expectations of housing and that provided by the state or encouraged by the state through incentives to the market. Another issue of concern in this literature has been the increasing separation of people from the process of house building and its negative effects both in terms of the quality and cost of the housing, its suitability to local conditions and its role in fostering liveable places. Scholars (Sengupta et al., 2018), citing examples from Brazil and India have highlighted the specific forms these housing units take, those dominated by rather small, poor quality housing units at peripheral locations, devoid of critical link between affordability, design, access and mobility and loss of social networks.

Thus, as many previously held assumptions about housing in India are currently starting to be questioned, new ways of defining housing problems, focussed on discrete characteristics of housing or people or geographies, are emerging. The emphasis on homeownership is questioned as with deconcentrating poverty through mixed income neighbourhoods. Whilst these are measure commonly seen in nearly all countries in the global south, they make an astounding failure in India, especially in housing the lowest segment of the population. Ultimately, for India, what has been the outcome of the complex set of policies, programmes and governance and how the country seeks to meet the housing deficit specific to the lower-­income and poorer segments of the urban population are pertinent questions. The solution remains eminently evasive and the process nuanced and case-sensitive to the immensely diverse context of Indian housing today.

The four articles in this Special Issue, authored by noted housing scholars, attempt to shed light on these two questions, in varying ways using a range of research methodologies. The first article ‘Financial constraints to adequate housing: an empirical analysis of housing consumption disequilibrium and household decisions on meeting housing requirements in India’ by Piyush Tiwari, Jyoti Shukla and Raghu Dharmapuri Tirumala addresses broad, national-level housing issues, turning our attention to the existing housing stock in India and its adequacy in meeting housing needs. The authors point out that much of India is still inadequately housed in terms of per capita space and quality of construction materials, that is, durability. The inadequacy is the highest among the poor and those in lower-level occupations, among renters and slum dwellers. Housing programmes have focussed largely on incentivising new housing stock while households, with limited access to institutional funds, generally opt for repair and improvement of existing housing rather than moving out to rent or buy a new unit. Facilitating institutional credit for housing improvement and repair, under the beneficiary-led construction component and the credit-linked subsidy component of the ongoing central government programme, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) would go a long way in alleviating housing consumption disequilibrium. It would also improve the quality of existing housing stock and thereby reduce housing inadequacy.

The second article ‘Policy implementation dynamics of national housing programmes in India- evidence from Madhya Pradesh’ by Sheuli Mitra examines the way PMAY is being implemented in a less urbanised state and in its smaller towns. It draws attention to the fact that the mass housing components in PMAY that depend on the existence of an active land market have not worked here. In smaller towns, the land is still relatively cheap and people prefer to build their own houses. Thus, there has been a much greater preference for the beneficiary-led construction component and the credit-linked subsidy component of PMAY, both of which facilitate own house building on individual plots. The author notes that the programme would gain more flexibility in implementation in smaller towns where there is a ‘need for more autonomy at the local level in order to respond to local contexts’.

This is further developed in the third article ‘Refusing slum-centric mass housing: indigenous urbanism and mass housing programmes in Aizawi, India’ by Lalitha Kamath where the limitations of top-down centrally designed housing programmes are starkly illustrated. In order to receive funds from Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), the remote and mountainous state of Mizoram had to create several new institutions of governance as well as the category ‘slum’. With its history of informal, incrementally built housing governed by tribal institutions and practices, the mass housing schemes under Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP) were resisted being seen as disruptive of the local social order and indigenous ways of producing housing. Resistance was reflected in the inordinate delays in starting schemes, completing them and allotting beneficiaries. Learning from this experience, when PMAY, the successor to JNNURM was started in 2016, the state government opted out of the programme components that involve mass housing and instead have taken up the components that focus on self-building.

The fourth article, ‘Outsiders in the periphery: studies of the peripheralisation of low income housing in Ahmedabad and Chennai, India’ by Karen Coelho, Darshini Mahadevia and Glyn Williams, is a comparative study of two Indian cities, the former, where the private formal sector has been important as a supplier of low-income housing and the latter, where the state remains the dominant supplier of low-income housing. Yet, in their response to the large housing programmes of the central government, the outcomes have been similar namely, highest preference given to mass housing for the urban poor, mostly in distant locations, out in the city’s periphery. The fallout of such policies has been the exclusion of poor households from the process of housing production, reduced earnings, job loss, alienation from the locality and increased incidents of crime.

There are several common threads running through these four articles. First, that in India, as in other parts of the developing world, owner-built housing or self-construction is still a common approach to housing production but this aspect has not received appropriate attention in post liberalisation national housing policy. Second, excessive focus on new units with few incentives for the improvement and repair of the existing stock goes against the common practices of a large section of the urban population that is financially constrained and prefers to build and repair homes incrementally as savings are accumulated. Third, using land as a resource to house the poor in high rises with little scope for extending their living space to keep up with family expansion or accommodating their work activities is not a workable model in all contexts. While it may work in large cities with land scarcity and small, nuclear families, in other contexts, it will have many beneficiaries opting out of actually living in the units and either reselling or renting out.

The future of Indian housing

Housing is a reflection on the problems that afflict our present society. From that standpoint it is an important issue today and in the future. This Special Issue is therefore a comment on today’s housing from a future perspective. The future described will probably never exist in the same form or order, but housing portrayal today provides the basis for solving the housing crisis tomorrow. The different papers in this special issue highlight many of the difficulties raised in housing studies - informal governance, conflicting policy objectives, lack of statistics, and potential for simultaneous creation of poverty and wealth - and the fact that the future of housing remains elusive, but they also show a way forward. Tiwari, Shukla and Tirumala’s paper shows that a precondition for wider housing delivery is the availability of formal housing finance. This may require widespread restructuring of the finance mechanism especially targeted to the low-income population. Likewise, Mitra’s paper highlights the need for ‘building in’ finance mechanism for improving housing conditions through minor expansion, alteration etc. for the poor. The access to formal finance in PMAY’s Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme (CLSS) is procedurally limited when a household needs it for expansion or alteration. Kamath’s paper shows the value of resistance to external policies promoting local distinctiveness as a way of avoiding exclusionary policies and treating housing as an interdisciplinary subject. Inclusion remains a theme for the future in Coelho, Mahadevia and Williams’s paper in making a case for building homes taking into consideration particular needs of the low-income community, which would then address the apparent ‘dis-location’ that engulfs many peripheral housing blocks in major cities in India.

Finally, the four articles in this Special Issue are fine examples of research that is stretching the boundaries of what was conventionally covered under urban housing issues. With their fresh perspectives, they uncover a reality that is more complex and layered than that addressed in official policy. They also show how government responses to housing problems can side step the core issues and create a discourse that shifts the concerns elsewhere. At this point in India’s developmental trajectory, when PMAY 2.0 is being conceived, it is important to reflect on the learning from the last seventy years on how to better house the growing urban population, especially the poor, and in what ways such understanding can be integrated into existing policy. All four articles provide valuable pointers in this direction.

Urmi Sengupta School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
[email protected]
Annapurna Shaw Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, India

[email protected] Debolina Kundu National Institute of Urban Affairs, Delhi, India [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Housing providers in India rely on economic stratification of the society in distributing public housing based on household income as follows: Economically Weaker Section (EWS) > INR 300,000; Low income Group (LIG): INR 300,000–600,000); Middle Income Group (MIG): INR 600,000–1,200,000; Higher Income Group (HIG): over INR 1.200,000.