Informality

Regularising Delhi’s 1639 unauthorised colonies has been a regular issue in Delhi’s assembly elections for many years now. Based on field research carried out in the Uttam Nagar area of west Delhi during the months of January and February 2020, this piece helps to understand what the promise and process of regularisation has involved, and how it has played out for the residents before the Delhi elections of 2020?

The 2011 Census of India reveals that the urban population of the country stood at 377 million or 31.16 percent of the total population. This is estimated to have increased to 437 million by 2021, which is about 36 percent of the total population.

Cities in poorer countries are home to a heterogeneous mix of tenures: owners, landlords, tenants and sharers jostle for residential accommodation in pursuit of urban livelihoods and social well-being.

Practising social distancing and staying home to fight the coronavirus is not possible for migrant workers without housing security.

A significant proportion of the working poor in Asian cities live in slums as renters. An estimated 60–90 per cent of low-income rentals in Asia are in the informal sector; 25 per cent of India’s housing stock comprises informal rentals. Yet informal rentals remain an understudied area.

This paper analyses the weight of overlapping burdens of precarity on the urban poor through the story of the demolition of an informal settlement and homeless shelter in Delhi.

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.

This paper examines how existing processes linked to the political economy of land and housing development shape or, in other words, are determinants of rental housing for the urban poor in the city of Guwahati in Assam.

Chaos, irrelevance, incompetence and exclusion, what do these “failures” tell us about the apparently self-evident understandings of plans, “planning” and “planned development” in Delhi?

Studies across the world have shown the presence of rental housing in almost all informal and slum settlements. This research is an attempt to understand rental housing within the informal housing and discerning its characteristics in comparison to the informal sector owner-occupied housing in the city of Rajkot in Gujarat.