Housing Policy's Million-Plus Cities Challenge

The biggest challenge for India's housing policy has been enabling the development of adequate formal housing for the urban poor and low-income households in the country's million-plus cities.

- DEBARPITA ROY

India's urban housing policy bundles these households into the economically weaker section (EWS) income group — defined as households with an annual income of ₹3 lakh or less, and housing programmes of the Union and state governments mostly target this group.

This focus is spot on. Empirical studies show that the share of EWS households among inadequately housed households has been increasing — from 96 per cent in 2012, according to the technical group constituted to estimate the urban housing shortage for the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, to 99 per cent in 2018, according to another study using the same methodology.

An independent study finds that the long-running Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U) programme has shown the way for addressing this challenge in non-million cities (under 1 million population).

Supported by PMAY-U's subsidy for self-construction of independent houses, more than 6 million EWS households in these cities have either completed or are in the process of self-constructing houses on land they own.

But self-constructed houses as a policy solution don't work in million-plus cities, since land is costly and its ownership by households is rare. So, one has to turn to flats.

But developing flats is far more complex than households building their own homes.

To address this, states, under their "affordable housing" policies, have been trying to spur both public and private developers to develop flats.