Urban housing in India

Abstract

Make Room! Make Room! is a 1966 science fiction novel written by Harry Harrison exploring the consequences of both unchecked population growth on society and the hoarding of resources by a wealthy minority. the author claims the idea came from an indian whom he met after the war, in 1946, who told him ‘overpopulation is the big problem coming up in the world’. india today is a perfect embodiment of the writer’s imagination. the country presents an intriguing housing conundrum, emerging from the population growth, which records 51 new births registered every minute and the challenges associated with housing them. its positioning at the halfway house between modernity and tradition, formal and informal and globalisation and localisation ascribes new meanings to housing and its links to all forms of wealth creation and social status. these imaginings take place under abrupt beginnings or endings of policies; complex, landscapes of stakeholder interaction or (non)interaction and under the highly politicised and often arcane legislative universe. this context surfaces important questions about governance, power relations, paradoxes and contradictions that are typically under-explored within mainstream housing studies about india. Very little has changed in the last seven decades of the country’s independence on the housing front. india still faces the daunting challenge of adequately housing its urban residents. With an urban population of 461 million in 2018 estimated to double by 2050 (UN, 2019, p. 43), the last official estimate of the requirement of urban housing indicated the need for 18.78 million units (Goi, 2012) with 96% of the need concentrated in the lower income Group (liG) and the Economically Weaker Section (EWS).1 Unofficial estimates, using a similar methodology of calculating housing need and extending out to include family expansion, obsolescence of existing stock and numbers of the homeless place the requirement much higher, at 29 million units in 2018. Coupled with a squeeze on the per-capita floor area of congested households from 111 sq ft in 2012 to 83 sq ft in 2018, housing need is not just about aspirations but signals the urgent need to address congestion (roy & Meera, 2020). importantly, congestion of living space has been the most dominant reason for the housing shortage, characteristic to EWS and liG households. https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2022.2133340