Resource Reports

This study aims to document the living conditions of migrant workers, particularly their access to housing and land in Delhi—where they lived—and in their villages as well as the challenges faced by them during the COVID-19 crisis. While the lockdown has been lifted in India, in phases from 1 June 2020, lessons learned from this period can be used to frame land and housing policies and to develop low-cost social housing models, not only for migrant workers, but also for all those living in homelessness and inadequate housing in urban and rural areas.

This report is based on a primary assessment of the state of habitat improvement in Kerala, under the ambit of PMAY (U)-LIFE (Livelihood, Inclusion and Financial Empowerment) Mission, through a quantitative household survey in three cities of Kerala – Kochi, Trivandrum and Mukkam. It finds that the State’s interventions towards the Housing for All agenda have underscored the importance attributed to the landless and the homeless in the state, rather than slum dwellers exclusively. The State’s interventions have also successfully demonstrated an approach towards enabling livelihoods through housing and imbibing financial empowerment among women.

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.

This is the report of a research study conducted in Ahmedabad to study the provision of housing and other facilities for the workers who live “on-site”; explore the regulatory framework for this provisioning; try to develop an understanding on how developers and contractors view their workers’ housing question and how it can be improved; and for this purpose, also review interventions for migrant workers’ housing in other countries and other Indian states that could inform these ideas.

Through an analysis of shelter and homelessness data from the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board and the Census, this study examines extent of overcrowding in Delhi’s homeless shelters and its implications on the ability of residents in these spaces to socially distance to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It examines the nature and implications of limited floor space across Delhi’s homeless shelter system to ascertain the extent to which the system’s capacity and coverage problems are rooted in shelter planning and design.

This note outlines the dynamics and determinants of affordable housing in the Chennai Metropolitan Area, drawing on data from a five-year period (2013-2018). It estimates Chennai’s housing shortage and affordability line, outlines the role of state and private players in supplying affordable housing, and discusses builders’ responses to state incentives aimed at increasing their supply of such housing. It ends with some comments on the post-pandemic market for affordable housing.

This is a diploma thesis profiling informal rental housing through fieldwork carried out in Ambedkar Nagar, a resettlement colony in Chennai. It looks at the differences between local Tamil residents and migrants from the north-eastern region of India, and analyses how financial means can affect housing pathways and the security of tenure for different income groups.

The Cities of Delhi(COD) project starts with the simple recognition that India’s capital is marked by different settlement types, defined by diverse degrees of formality, legality and tenure which taken together produce a highly differentiated pattern of access to basic services. The project provides a comprehensive picture of how the city is governed, and especially […]

In this paper, the authors lay down what they understand as “affordable housing”— a term that can mean many things to many people— and present a set of empirics to locate their understanding of affordability. Following that, they sets out ten dynamics that are often seen to be at the root of why extreme housing inequalities persist in Indian cities. For each, they outline existing debates, suggest policy responses and interventions
and, at times, mark the medium- and long-term structural changes required. Finally, they summarize by a necessary partial translation into action and locate their suggested interventions with particular institutions and different scales of government.

This paper examines how existing processes linked to the political economy of land and housing development shape or, in other words, are determinants of rental housing for the urban poor in the city of Guwahati in Assam.