Affordable Housing: Policy And Practice in India
Vol. 27, No 2, by Kalpana Gopaln and Madalasa Venkataraman; June 2015
“Housing for all by 2022” is the vision of the Indian government. To meet this need, the government has to meet an estimated shortfall of around 18 million houses.
Combined with India’s anticipated urbanized population of 810 million by 2050, the gap in housing is formidable indeed. While this begs the need for a state policy to handle this shortage, what makes it more imperative is that 99 percent of the estimated shortage is in the economically weaker section of society. The challenges in terms of large scale rural-urban migration and the overburdened state of infrastructure in existing cities need to be pro-actively managed as well.
This academic note accompanying the round table on “Affordable housing: Policy and practice in India” seeks to lay a framework for the discussion that follows amongst the panellists. The academic discussion provides the nature and context of the problem, and discusses the roles of various institutional agencies involved in setting up housing policy, as well as the challenges and opportunities faced by the state in framing affordable housing policy. It also draws upon international experience to document the challenges faced by other countries in affordable housing and the policy responses that form a part of their arsenal in tackling this problem.
The latter half of the article documents the round table discussion where the panellists bring out the on-ground issues faced in building affordable housing projects. The multiple perspectives e of the urban planner, the architect, the builder, the developer, the financier and the user e are amalgamated in a discussion that brings out the lacunae in affordable housing policy as well as highlights the issues that need greater attention. The academic note provides a backdrop against which the panellists’ discussions can be viewed to make sense of policy bottlenecks faced by the affordable housing industry and its stakeholders.