worker housing

As a response to the COVID-19 migrant crisis and in furtherance of the Government of India’s ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’ mission, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs announced the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) programme under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana scheme to improve the living conditions of urban poor/migrant workers. Although the initiative is a novel step, it operational aspects demand more than what is being offered for enabling private/public agencies to leverage the opportunity and turn it into a grand scale programmatic intervention.  

The affordable housing rental complex (AHRC) scheme acknowledges the needs of mobile workers who spend short periods of time in the city and do not seek permanent housing. Applying what we know about migrant work and the development sector will help India to realise AHRC’s potential.

The Government of India announced the Affordable Rental Housing Complex (ARHC) scheme in 2020 to provide formal, affordable, and well-located housing to urban poor and migrant workers’ communities. This study documents the results of a survey conducted by the Working People’s Charter covering aspects of ARHC supply streams, communities’ capacities and needs, and the scheme’s governance.

While central and state governments have launched several housing policies over the years to promote ownership-based housing for the ‘urban poor’, the housing requirements of migrant workers remain neglected. The sudden announcement of a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 led to an exodus of migrants from cities due to their inability to pay rents for rooms after losing their jobs. It is thus crucial to understand what housing means to migrants in cities, and how cities can be made more livable for migrant workers. This piece attempts to answer some of these questions through interviews of several migrant workers in the national capital region to understand their experiences and perspectives.

A new report by CLRA, authored by Renu Desai, offers extraordinary insights on-site construction worker housing in Ahmedabad, revealing gaps and opportunities for policy intervention.

This is the report of a research study conducted in Ahmedabad to study the provision of housing and other facilities for the workers who live “on-site”; explore the regulatory framework for this provisioning; try to develop an understanding on how developers and contractors view their workers’ housing question and how it can be improved; and for this purpose, also review interventions for migrant workers’ housing in other countries and other Indian states that could inform these ideas.