Housing Poverty in Urbanizing India: Emerging Trends and Concerns

Urbanization and housing shortage in India seem to go together. Housing Poverty, viewed as homelessness and inadequate shelter is acquiring alarming dimension in the wake of rapid urbanization, commodification of land and housing, distortion in land market and weakening of public sector housing provision in post liberalisation period. Housing shortage in urban areas is growing and situation is worsening for the poor (LIGs and EWSs). The segregated settlements emerging due to housing shortage may jeopardize the future economic and social development in urban India. The labour is shifting to urban areas with decline in employment in Primary Sector.  Non-affordability of housing by economically weaker sections of society and low income families in urban areas is directly linked with the magnitude of poverty. Housing and urban development seem to be neglected in urban policy planning over successive planning eras and public sector investment in the same has declined drastically. It is also argued that JNNURM also did not adequately integrate housing and infrastructure delivery to the extent required. In particular, housing policies have failed to resolve the problems of displacement, affordability, cost-recovery and replicability. Housing affordability is a major issue and effective repayment capacity of the slum dwellers for better housing is very poor. The paper suggests that there is an urgent need to speed up social housing programmes to provide affordable housing to the houseless slum dwellers to tackle the growing problem of housing poverty and resultant inequality in urbanizing India. The paper relies on secondary data, Ph D synopsis, recently prepared two term papers on Housing Poverty in a Planned City and Slums in India: Socio-cultural Dynamics and also some recent studies by the author having housing one of the important focus areas.