housing

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.

The ‘co-living’ concept is a reflection of the ‘asset-light model’ that was pioneered by the hospitality sector. The concept is fast emerging as an alternative residential real estate offering, ensuing as a sustainable solution to the ever-growing urban space scarcity. To map, understand, and predict the development and growth of this shared housing segment, JLL Research conducted a demand survey targeting millennials across the top seven cities in India, and the report foresees this young shared living market continuing to be re-shaped during its nascent years. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

In keeping with its mandate to improve the quality of life of residents of JJ clusters, DUSIB constructed an Economically Weaker Section (EWS) Housing Society in Baprola Phase 2, approximately 25km from central Delhi. However, in less than five years from completion and relocation of allottees, issues of seepage, cracks in walls, peeling of bricks, overflowing drains have been reported by residents, including to DUSIB. The emergence and wide prevalence of these issues in such a short duration necessitated the need for a comprehensive assessment of the design, construction quality, and grievance redressal mechanism in this context.

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.

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 […]