Chennai

In October 2021, the Tamilnadu government released its first-ever draft “Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy” for public comment.  While long-awaited, the policy is also premature. It is not anchored in a comprehensive housing and habitat policy that defines a framework for affordable housing, slum clearance, and land use in which the relocation of slum dwellers to remote peripheries is specified as a last-ditch option. Instead of leveraging Chennai and Tamilnadu’s rich history of implementing innovative and inclusionary models of slum rehabilitation and affordable housing, the policy implicitly clings to the tired and discredited model of mass peripheral resettlement and threatens to perpetuate it further.

Affordable housing in Chennai means a unit costing between ₹ 8 and 20 lakh (₹8-10.2 lakh for EWS and ₹16-20 lakh for LIG households), based on the Deepak Parekh Committee’s definition of affordability. In practice, however, state agencies as well as private builders define affordable housing by size, referring to units of 300 to 600 square feet.  This approach has contributed to making most “affordable” housing produced in the city unaffordable to EWS and LIG households.

The private residential real estate market in urban India is diverse, and housing typologies vary within and across geographies. This is the third in a series of data pieces highlighting some of the characteristics of private real estate market in India across selected geographies between 2009-2019, based on data provided by Liases Foras, India’s only non-broking real-estate research company.

The private residential real estate market in urban India is diverse, and housing typologies vary within and across geographies. This is the second in a series of data pieces highlighting some of the characteristics of private real estate market in India across selected geographies between 2009-2019, based on data provided by Liases Foras, India’s only non-broking real-estate research company.

A major political question for governments around the globe is to determine which form of housing tenure – ownership or rental – would best fit their housing policy agenda. It is now well understood that both forms of tenure need to be taken into consideration as complementary and integral parts of urban housing markets. However, rental housing is not a distinct category, but an umbrella term which covers diverse manifestation of renting a home and various forms of supply. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2019, this piece explores the rental practices in Ambedkar Nagar, a 1990s sites and services scheme in Chennai, India in the context of recent changes in rental legislation in the state of Tamil Nadu where Chennai is located.

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 creation of mass ghettos of urban poverty in the middle of ecologically fragile lands exposes the fraudulence of both the environmental and the socio-legal rationale of resettlement in Chennai.