gender

Adequate housing is not just houses, but ensuring safe, liveable and inclusive neighbourhoods for all. Art and culture are an integral part of this process. ‘Fursat ki Fizayen’, a socially engaged art project encouraging women’s participation in public space, offers insights into how young women from peri-urban areas exercise their ‘right to the city’ with a focus on spaces and stories of leisure. Based in Madanpur Khadar – an under-resourced, poorly serviced resettlement colony in Delhi with a predominantly working class population – the project is an example of how socially engaged art creates openings that commercial practice does not, and has the potential to reconfigure residential communities towards inclusion.

Housing remains a central issue for migrants in urban India, particularly female migrants. In this historical study of internal labour migration between the late 1960s to early 1980s, the lack of proper housing facilities in Pune city emerges as a major cause of anxiety for a section of migrants from Kerala. A closer examination of their oral narratives reveals gendered constraints in their access to rental housing in an emerging urban space.

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.