Infrastructure Today | September 2008

Editor’s page

QUEST FOR THE NANO HOME

It doesn’t require a rocket scientist to say that India has a terrible record when it comes to urban housing. The increasing proliferation of slums in Mumbai, a classic instance being that hell hole which residents have dubbed Dharavi – present enough evidence of governmental apathy and cynicism. The bleak situation appears to be extending itself across the country with now the verdict that 23 per cent of India’s billion plus population is confined to urban slums.

Even scarier is the fact that there is a national backlog of 24.7 million housing units. With real estate prices soaring into stratospheric heights, not to mention the rising interest rates, the place that we all know as home is increasingly getting out of reach for the middle class. For the economically weaker sections and the lower income groups across the country it is a mirage. This, after 61 years of independence.

The urban dilemma has got the minders in New Delhi worried. There is now an urgency to find solutions for the malaise called housing shortage which has assumed gigantic proportions purely because it was allowed to fester. The search for the housing equivalent of the Nano has begun – with both the government – through schemes such as JNNURM – and new private sector players, through affordable low cost housing looking to bridge the gap for India’s poor. By any stretch of imagination that is a huge task. The enormity, to be read as hopelessness, of the task is underlined by the fact that a financial institution like HDFC only managed to finance 2.5 million homes in a quarter century! The focus now both at the Central, state and private sector level is to use all instruments to scale up operations, the urgency of which there is no previous precedent. For starters, to be able to bridge the housing gap, there is a huge price tag attached: a mammoth investment of Rs 3,61,318 crore is required by India Inc during 2007-2012 to address the shortage. This cannot come purely from the government. It is too much to expect government financial bodies such as the Housing and Urban Development Organisation, which has been playing a commendable role in housing all these years, to continue to plough the lone furrow. It’s reach can only be limited in the absence of private initiative.
The need of the hour is to woo the private sector, currently a disinterested player, to low cost housing, with fiscal and spatial incentives. The issue is of total reform of the housing sector and increasing initiation of public private partnerships. It is also about Political Will and Common Weal. Will the housing sector have its own Nano? To know more about that read on in this issue’s cover story.