The housing sector demands high-level creativity. Conventional bureaucratic approach and existing laws can merely scratch the problem
Every day, countless families struggle to keep a decent roof over their heads. There are millions of low-income families, who live in overcrowded, unsafe spatchcock dwellings, crammed between dusty paths and open sewers with virtually no sanitation, environmental risk factors and lack of even the barest infrastructure. These are usually socially homogenous encampments where unskilled poor live among themselves, disconnected from others, making it harder for them to access mainstream economy.
The dwellers experience exclusion, discrimination and lack of hope to access adequate and affordable housing. They are under constant threat of being evicted without notice. A single eviction could destabilise multiple blocks, not to account for the block to which the family is begrudgingly relocated. Most of their possessions — water containers and tents among others — are periodically steamrolled by eviction agencies.
There is little more critical to a family’s quality of life than a healthy and safe living space. However, this section of India’s poor lives in inhuman conditions and is often under the threat of displacement, harassment and arrest. Over the last decade, India has substantially expanded its net of welfare policies, aimed at lifting millions from poverty. It seems that the time has come for making ‘right to shelter’ a reality. Priority for housing ought to be higher than education and health.
Challenges for India are daunting and homelessness has become a powerful monster. An estimated 65 million people, or 13.6 million households, are housed in urban slums, according to the 2011 Census. It also showed that an additional 1.8 million people are homeless. Recent estimates by the Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs indicate a housing shortage of nearly three crore units in rural areas and 1.2 crore units in urban areas. The grim aspect of the housing scenario is that the number of homeless is huge despite the fact that its composition of urban population is much lower compared to other countries. According to the World Bank, urban population, as a proportion of the total population in 2015, stood at 86 per cent in Brazil, 56 per cent in China, 54 per cent in Indonesia, 79 per cent in Mexico, 82 per cent in South Korea and 31 per cent in India.
By the accepted definition of slum (minimum 60 households), more than 2,500 Indian cities have slums; overall, there are 33,500 slums and the total population stands at 65.5 million. About 90 per cent of the residents have electric power and 56 per cent have access to water. These figures pose a huge challenge for planners. Affordable housing has assumed great importance because it generates direct and indirect employment in the medium-term and sustained consumption in the long-term. A 2014 study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research indicated that every additional rupee of capital invested in the housing sector adds Rs 1.54 to the GDP and every Rs 1 lakh invested in residential housing creates 2.69 new jobs in the economy.
The lack of official land titles is a major impediment to the acquisition of housing finance. People do not have documentary proof of being owners of the land on which they live. Many low-income villagers have owned their land for generations. Landlessness and the lack of secure property rights are among those inequities that perpetuate poverty, hold back economic development and generate social tensions. Demographic shifts, combined with poor or non-existent land ownership policies, have spawned huge slums across the country.
For most of India’s poor and the vulnerable, secure property rights, including land tenure, are a rare accessible luxury. Land tenure determines who can use land, under what conditions and for how long. Tenure arrangements may be based both on official laws and policies, and on informal customs. There was a time when landlessness affected a smaller chunk of the population. However, the number of landless people has been rising. The ones without land joined the ranks of the worst ones in extreme poverty and the task of poverty alleviation became even more difficult. Considering the links between landlessness and poverty or the need to score better successes against poverty, it is important to put a hard brake on the process of becoming landless. Land is a very price-sensitive commodity and its current shortage in most city-centric areas is an impediment towards creating affordable housing in urban areas where it is most needed. Some suggestions from experts can serve as useful markers for policy-makers while designing Government programmes for housing.
• Governments should improve the legal and regulatory environment related to housing and increase the supply of affordable, legal shelter with tenure security and access to basic amenities.
• The Government must undertake physical upgradation of informal settlements. Informal urban settlements can be provided with infrastructure by widening roads, creating playgrounds, laying sewage pipes and installing water taps and toilets. These services create a high-level of tenure security without a formal change of legal status and encourage local improvements which can transform these slums into liveable habitats.
• Making in situ improvements to these settlements would allow slum residents to remain connected to their own critical social and economic networks.
• The Government should consider converting under-utilised urban land for affordable housing and economic development with realistic standards for development. It can recognise semi-formal titles of land as workable collateral for home improvement loans.
• The Government should also endow slum dwellers with land rights for residential use that are inheritable, mortgageable and non-transferable. Endowing them with mortgageable titles can open the gates for improving health, education and employment.
In response to the non-availability of tangible collateral from low-income households, as required by the formal financial sector, a new stream of lending has emerged, called ‘housing micro-finance’. Institutionalised micro-finance systems have come up with innovative solutions. These draw on the best practices in micro-finance but remain adapted to the classical housing finance paradigm. This has been highly successful wherever Governments are offering long-term tenancies and shared-ownership housing in a supportive context. But the sector is still in need of a more sustainable business model to grow.
(The writer is Member, NITI Aayog’s National Committee on Financial Literacy and Inclusion for Women)
