housing accessibility


Life in Baprola: Post Resettlement Stories of Inadequacy and Vulnerability

By on May 12th 2022

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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Addressing information asymmetries to enable housing coproduction: Q&A with Rohit Lahoti and Sayali Marawar

By on August 24th 2021

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.

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Facilitating housing finance for those with unclear titles

By on August 10th 2021

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.

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Anxieties concerning housing among early migrants in Pune

By on February 17th 2021

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.

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Emerging partnerships in low-income housing finance: Q&A with Manikandan K.P.

By on December 28th 2020

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.

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Informal rental practices in an old sites and services resettlement: The case of Ambedkar Nagar, Chennai

By on November 24th 2019

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.

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