Outputs

 

  • Deconstructing the ‘Pucca House’

    Successive governments in India have pushed for the construction of ‘pucca’ houses to improve the quality of low-income housing. The pace picked up during the PMAY, a large-scale program on house building that started in 2015. The total number of completed houses under the program in rural and urban areas is nearly 25 million, which is about 11.1% of the housing stock in India. This tale, investigates two questions—how does the notion of ‘pucca houses’ manifest in different regions in India; and what are the changes that happened in this landscape after PMAY implementation.

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  • Housing and Spatial Segregation: Snippets from Aurangabad 

    Experiences of housing emanate, not just from aspects of affordability, economic activity and city planning, but also link back to how social, cultural and political events and processes have unfolded over time. This article is based on fieldwork done in Aurangabad and traces the historical evolution of housing and spatial segregation in the city.

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  • How the content of demands shapes government responsiveness: Excerpts from a Discussion

    This post features highlights from the 146th talk in the series of CPR-CSH Urban Workshops, where Tanu Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at William and Mary, talks about the nature of formal complaints lodged by citizens against bureaucrats, and how the content of these demands shape government responsiveness. The discussion delves into her research looking at theory and evidence from Mumbai, which distinguishes between complaints demanding the reallocation of resources between citizens and those that simply require some level of state capacity to address.

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  • Housing Policy Timeline: Part 2

    The Housing Policy Timeline is an attempt to understand and analyse the key policy shifts within this period. The timeline deals with the evolution of public policies on housing in India, and the consecutive Five-Year Plan wise allocation of funds towards housing schemes and policy initiatives. Across the timeline, the various schemes and policies initiated and institutions set up help in understanding the role of economic and political ideologies and priorities.

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  • Governing the Houseless in India during COVID-19 Lockdown: Excerpts from a discussion

    This post features highlights from the 145th talk in the series of CPR-CSH Urban Workshops, where Paroj Banerjee, Ratoola Kundu, and Maggie Paul talk about their ongoing research in Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi on the struggles of the houseless communities during 2020 to 2021. The discussion and the study raises important policy and governance questions about houseless communities in the city, arguing that the predominant shelter-centric policy discourse fails to capture the agency, the lived realities, and fundamental contributions and specific vulnerabilities of those who have made a home in the city, but do not have a ‘house’ to live in.

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  • Housing Policy Timeline: Part 1

    The Housing Policy Timeline is an attempt to understand and analyse the key policy shifts within this period. The timeline deals with the evolution of public policies on housing in India, and the consecutive Five-Year Plan wise allocation of funds towards housing schemes and policy initiatives. Across the timeline, the various schemes and policies initiated and institutions set up help in understanding the role of economic and political ideologies and priorities.

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  • “A potential death sentence”: Impact Assessment of Evictions during the Pandemic in Delhi

    The making of the city of Delhi is characterised by perennial eviction at the legal and spatial peripheries of its urban landscape. Disturbingly, this character of regular eviction was not disturbed even during the time of the COVID–19  pandemic, when the world was facing a state of exception.

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  • Life in Baprola: Post Resettlement Stories of Inadequacy and Vulnerability

    Close to 900 families live in the ordered stacks of four-storeyed flats in Baprola in west Delhi. After being evicted from their informal bastis within the city, they were herded and resettled into these low-rise flats, each with barely enough space to house the families of four to five members. Pushed far from their places of work, with peeling plastered walls and water shortages, the residents lament about their state of residence, their grievances unheard and unseen, all but forgotten in the peripheries of the city.

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  • Bulldozing Due Process: Motivated Demolitions of Informal Constructions in Delhi

    Last week in the area of Jahangirpuri in Delhi, residents watched as bulldozers arrived early in the morning, and started hastily demolishing shops and homes. Videos of the bulldozers in the area surfaced online, showing a large crowd gathered, and residents imploring the authorities to spare their homes. One of many resettlement colonies formed in […]

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