Affordable Housing in India - Myth or an Unfulfilled Dream

Affordable Housing in India - Myth or an Unfulfilled Dream
Image source: Google

Although the government has made sufficient noise about affordable housing, there continues to be a lack in the implementation of schemes.

Quality, quantity, availability, and affordability are the four major clauses that drive the concept of affordable housing in India. While the Modi government had strived to come up with more than four crores affordable houses by the year 2022, reportedly only one crore houses have been established as per March 2019. The scheme, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, aims to subsidise the construction of 2.95 crore rural houses and 1.2 urban houses by 2022.

Unfortunately, the implementation of the scheme has been leaden-footed, and a report by Accountability Initiative at the Center for Policy Research has noted that the construction of rural houses is taking way longer than the 12 months schedule which was initially charted. 35% of the houses were not complete even after two years of being sanctioned. Moreover, the deficit of affordable homes is said to be reaching 30 million by 2022. So before we delve into the criticism behind what went wrong, let’s take a look at what affordable housing really is.

 

What is Affordable Housing?

It refers to the housing plans for those who earn below the average income. It is provided for people in the low income category, middle income section, and the economically weaker segments who have considerably low levels of income in urban areas. It has been a key issue in the development of India where a majority of the population is still unable to afford a house for themselves. However, it should be noted that affordable housing demands very different kind of schemes in the rural and the urban sectors of the country.

 

What is the need for Affordable Housing?

In a country like India where there is a minimum balance between the middle class population and the upper class, with the former dominating a majority of the population scale, to establish affordable houses are mandatory. There has always been a wide gap between the demand for houses and its availability and this gap keeps widening as there is a lack in proper housing systems which qualify in all the four categories mentioned above.

The imbalance between the rich and the middle class is a major cause behind the need for affordable housing. (Google)

More over the persistent transition from rural to urban has made it mandatory for almost all urban cities to have housing schemes that are easily affordable by the working class. However, when it comes to housing supplies in the city perhaps the foremost factor leading to its shortage is the high price of land in urban areas. This has in a way compelled the schemes to focus on the suburbs that are located far away from the city and hence transportation to workplaces becomes a major concern.

In a bustling city like Mumbai the centrally located houses are way out of reach for the common man, and those that are affordable are either in bad condition, or are located in the extreme corners of the city.

 

What is the actual problem with Affordable Housing?

As hinted earlier, some of the problems with affordable housing are pretty much prominent but there are some issues that arise due to the sheer lack of competence. There is always the option to renovate and utilize old buildings that are on the verge of getting dilapidated. However, builders more than often lack the basic capital to do so, and that sometimes leads to sheer incompetence which makes the project an utter failure. This process can only work if the government makes an attempt to solely mend the houses for affordable housing purposes, which otherwise might turn out to be a promoter’s attempt to make more profit rather than create quality houses for the dwellers.

 

      Sometimes it is the incompetent approach towards housing that creates a setback. (Google)

To put it clearly, India lacks the policies to build up affordable houses. More than the policies being put aside it is the lack of rigorous implementation which serves as a major setback for affordable housing. Since there is no hurry to implement these policies with the least check on land, slumlords tend to have a monopoly on large sectors of land in the country. On the other hand, a lot of land is also held by the government and business who utilize those to build more shopping complex than affordable houses- reason being there is of course more profit in a mall than a house.

While India is trying to cope with the lack of affordable housing, it might be a good start to look into how other countries are dealing with the problem. In countries like Singapore, affordable housing has been an integral part of their land utilization plans; on the other hand, San Francisco has the worst affordable housing schemes. Yet, San Francisco can afford to be so since the society there is reasonably richer than India, where a majority still resides in the rural sectors.