The Dual Realities of India’s Housing Market
A typical tenement block of a migrant community in Kapashera, New Delhi.
My father does not have many hobbies, but if you ever saw him discuss real estate, you would think he doesn’t need any. He loves the real estate market. Not in a feudal-property-acquiring-lord sort of way, but in a very middle-class way where he understood, very early on, that if he did not want his child to grow up the way he had – poor, destitute and stressed – investing in the housing market was the only way to secure his and his family’s future.
As years went on and my parents kept investing in property, this strategy paid off. We did not get rich, but we got comfortable. Their acquisitions helped fund my foreign undergraduate degree and a lifestyle that we all have come to enjoy. As a daughter of individuals made financially secure by the real estate market, housing and real estate became synonymous terms for me.
I knew housing precarity existed – I am from Delhi and you must be really privileged and oblivious to think it doesn’t in a city like ours. But in middle-class, financially secure homes, where newspaper ads and billboards pander to your desire for a beautiful aashiana, it is remarkably easy to forget that it does.
Beyond being privileged, I am also a public policy student by the ways of which I hope to correct the systems that enable my privilege. My academic and professional interests have refined a lot over the years. I started off by making inquiries about religious nationalism and how Hindu nationalist policies lead to a very real socioeconomic deprivation of India’s Muslims. My questions surrounding gender inequality helped me discover the centrality of housing rights as a feminist issue. Most recently, as I begin to orient towards climate change, I am asking questions such as: what happens when flooding strikes? Who is displaced and who gets saved? What do these graded geographies mean?
Throughout my inquiries, housing, as a point of focus, has existed on the periphery. When I studied the socioeconomic impacts of Hindu nationalism, I wondered why Muslims were so often relegated to neighbourhoods so destitute. I questioned why women survivors of domestic abuse so often ended up homeless. And now, as I am thinking about climate adaptation strategies, I am wondering whose houses can adapt to climate change and who can afford to move. My inquires into ethnoreligious nationalism, gender-based injustice and climate change have converged and pointed towards housing and housing rights as a central issue. I have realized that housing is more than just a need for shelter – it typifies an assemblage of inequalities and, as a result, can act as a point of intervention to correct many injustices.
For these reasons, I believe in housing as a right. I believe that housing should primarily serve the social function of providing shelter instead of being a commodity that individuals can acquire to get richer. The real estate market or the ‘formal’ housing market comprises of only 10 per cent of the Indian housing market, but it occupies a disproportionate amount of space, both geographically and narratively. In Delhi, bastis that are rarely considered a part of the ‘formal’ real estate market only occupy 0.5 per cent of the land space even though a whopping 15 per cent of Delhi’s residents live in these bastis. Real estate projects, in comparison, crop up everywhere. Before demonetization that affected investments in property projects, I could not go 5 kilometres in my city without running into newer construction projects. It is particularly jarring because most homes in these complexes remain unoccupied even though government estimates will tell you that there is a shortage of 15-19 million homes in the country.
The bastis that do exist as part of the ‘informal’ housing market are razed regularly to make room for the ruling class’ overpriced apartments. The poor are displaced to the periphery because what hyper globalized metropolis allows them to dwell in the city’s centre? And on occasion when the threat of displacement doesn’t emerge from the elite’s demands, India’s bastis are also threatened by governmental schemes and policies.
In Indore, for instance, where I worked with housing activists who battle eviction, I saw first-hand how absolutely consuming the struggle against displacement can be. The real estate market will have you believe that the only challenge to acquiring a home is its price tag. But in Indore, as in all other parts of the country, basti residents do not just have to pay for a home, but have to struggle to get services, deliberate if their tenure is secure enough to convert their house to a pucca house, demand politicians to see their humanity and recognize their need for a home, be hyper-cognizant of emerging government missions that can lead to eviction or a real estate mogul who may be colluding with the government for their piece of land, and strategize constantly and relentlessly to remain one step ahead of the state.
In Sonia Gandhi Nagar, Indore, basti residents established a committee to fight eviction and as part of their strategy, erected a board with their demands for all visiting politicians to see and adhere to.
Home, as a result, remains no longer a space for rest for all. It becomes a battlefield where most are struggling against neoliberalism for survival. It makes evident that the real estate market, synonymous with the entire housing market for a lot of us, is simply a bid at claiming the future for the very few.
Our acknowledgement of housing precarity as a point of intervention, then, does not just address the immediate problem of homelessness and inadequacy, but creates conditions of possibility for change to happen. When we concede that there is a lot more to housing than just affordability, we begin to ask questions like: why does this happen? Who does this happen to? What other forms of injustices does inadequate housing lead to? What happens to our responses to climate change when most of the country lives in untenable areas? How do we ensure greater survival during a pandemic that necessitates staying at home in a country where secure homes don’t exist for all? How do we ensure a Swachh Bharat when tenure precarity prevents access to basic services?
My intention through this piece is to make evident that there are two simultaneous and asymmetrical realities of housing in India. One, where affordability is the greatest challenge to home acquisition; and once that is overcome, the home becomes a space for rest and security. Another, where the home is a space of struggle and activism; where, despite years of labour, love and sweat, there is no assurance that you will not be rendered homeless tomorrow. As a result, reconciling with and correcting this duality remains one of India’s greatest challenges in becoming a just republic.
Re-imagining the concept of house, housing and home within the Indian cities context.
