The role of access to information in empowering the poor is well-acknowledged in India and reinforced by the experience of the Right to Information Act, 2005. However, information asymmetries continue to hamper the ability of the poor to make informed decisions about their future. A new online resource seeks to address this gap in the context of housing. The IHR team speaks to the founders about their motivations, challenges and aspirations for this platform.

A report on IHR’s first webinar on Friday, 30th July on housing finance access to those with unclear titles. With experience across rural and urban contexts, the panel discussion revealed the complexities of the issue and highlighted potential directions for intervention.

Webinar on Friday, 30 July 2021, 5 PM IST onwards on Zoom, with a live-stream on Facebook

The poor in India’s cities have endured evictions and demolitions of their homes and settlements for decades now. While long legal and political battles have sometimes resulted in a modicum of justice through rehabilitation of affected households, demolitions themselves are irreversible acts that forever destroy a settlement and transform the area. initiatives like the Missing Basti Project (MBP) seek to document these erasures by utilising the power of the Internet to create an archive of material memory.

India’s urbanising middle class is at the brink of an unprecedented increase in residential cooling demand. New research by Centre for Policy Research and the University of Oxford answers a set of fundamental questions around India’s cooling transition.

An initiative to archive past and ongoing evictions in Delhi to question as well as mobilize action for the prevention of further evictions.

As the housing finance ecosystem adapts to service low-income housing, targeted interventions that build trust and connect disparate actors in the housing supply chain can bring transformative change. In this Q&A, Institution Builder and India Housing Federation co-founder Manikandan K. P. points out the opportunities and insights that led to a successful housing finance intervention for households availing the beneficiary-led construction (BLC) component of India’s flagship public housing scheme, the PMAY.

In continuation to the Government of Odisha’s landmark initiative of the Odisha Liveable Habitat Mission, also known as the JAGA Mission, launched in 2018, and the successful implementation of the Odisha Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act 2017, basic infrastructure upgradation and delisting of slums emerge as the next critical steps. Towards this end the Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI) initiative at the Centre for Policy Research as knowledge partner supported Housing and Urban Development Department, Government of Odisha, to prepare a ‘Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Participatory Slum Upgradation and Delisting’. The SOP intends to benefit the key stakeholders by laying down the procedure and benchmarks for undertaking participatory integrated slum level infrastructure upgradation and establishing procedure and documentation for delisting of the slum, to integrate it to the rest of the urban area.

The COVID-19 pandemic has badly affected the real estate sector in India, which was already struggling with a number of issues including sluggish sales. To get an understanding of what this means for the housing market, the IHR team spoke to Pankaj Kapoor, Managing Director, Liases Foras, which conducts data-driven market research on the real estate sector in India. We asked him about the effects of the pandemic and future prospects for the sector, which is an important supplier of housing in India.

The 2011 Census of India reveals that the urban population of the country stood at 377 million or 31.16 percent of the total population. This is estimated to have increased to 437 million by 2021, which is about 36 percent of the total population.