28 CONFETTI
THE STATE OF HOUSING IN INDIA
An introductory seminar on the The State of Housing in India was held with
an intent to create a collective dialogue regarding the proposed exhibition on
the same subject, and to facilitate a conversation within the community of
professionals and citizens at large. The seminar attempted to look at housing
and its relationship with urbanisation, and by extension, its relationship to
livelihood and amenities, which are otherwise unfortunately overlooked
India is undergoing a dramatic urban
transformation. “Urban India will be like a giant slum
by 2030. It took nearly 40 years for India’s urban
population to rise by 230 million, but it will take only
half the time to add the next 250 million.” (Sankhe,
Vittal & Mohan, April 2010) In 2011, based on
the census surveys, 30% of India’s population
resided in urban areas and this is expected to rise
to 40% by 2030. This process of urbanisation
is accelerating because of many factors such as
migration from rural areas for better economic
opportunities and quality of life, escaping caste and
other social discriminations, displacement due to
natural disasters and developmental projects and
so forth. Today, there is an urban housing shortage
of approximately 20 million units, out of which 57%
were for the economically weaker sections and
40% for the low-income groups – more broadly.
(Ministry of Urban Development, 2013)
In spite of this looming crisis, there is a lack of a
national discussion on housing within the context
of an unprecedented level of urbanisation that the
country is facing today, and will, in the near future.
Housing is intrinsically linked to urbanisation as
it comprises the largest component of any urban
form. This questions the role of architects/planners
today in shaping the housing landscape for a more
sustainable and inclusive urban development in
India going forward.
Notes on the first panel discussion
(Hafeez Contractor, Nuru Karim, Ashok Lall,
Sameep Padora and Kirtee Shah; moderated by
Kaiwan Mehta)
The panel discussion that followed the proceedings
of the first session led by Kirtee Shah’s emphatic
keynote presentation emphasised the challenges
and issues within the accepted parameters set
for defining aspects for a house by the forces of
the market as well as governing agencies. The
definition of ‘affordability’ and the fact that for
the lower margins of society, affordability is a real
challenge, has been highlighted often, although
policy guidelines often seem to contradict that – as
he later mentions where the average daily wage
of an individual in the rural areas is assumed to
be a little over 600 rupees a day – a figure that
one can say is perhaps quite bloated beyond real
conditions. What is also of serious concern is the
set of parameters which begin to guide the nature
of a dwelling or a ‘house’ — across geographies
and socio-economic contexts.
Today one sees a frightful homogenisation
of housing typologies throughout the country
irrespective of a region’s culture, geography,
climate and economy – and as such brings to
the fore the question of what model needs to be
followed as the question of housing and urbanity
are inextricably interlinked. Conversely, what is
also apparent is the failure of the supposed ‘free
urban housing’ model, such as those of the SRA
and similar schemes, that see at least a quarter of
In this context, ‘The State of Housing in India’
exhibition is proposed to be held in 2018, and
in preparation towards this exhibition, various
conferences and lectures have been planned.
The proceedings of the inaugural seminar, held
between 3-4 February 2017, have been compiled
together in a booklet, the extracts from which are
published below.
The inaugural seminar featured keynote lectures
by noted practitioners such as Kirtee Shah, Sheela
Patel, Amita Bhide, Aromar Revi, Vidyadhar Phatak
and Pranay Vakil; presentations by Sameep
Padora, Nuru Karim, Ashok Lall, Prasanna Desai,
Hafeez Contractor, Pankaj Joshi, Gautam Bhan,
Alpa Sheth, Sharad Mahajan, Gautam Chatterjee
and Swastik Harish, followed by a set of panel
discussions moderated by Rahul Mehrotra and
Kaiwan Mehta.
their units unoccupied — as Amita Bhide from the
audience pointed out — as well as a lot of violence
due to degrading social conditions.
Sameep Padora noted how the labeling of
these schemes as ‘free housing’ is a misnomer,
considering the massive cross-subsidisation
wherein the developer builds the ‘cheaper’ houses
in what is mistakenly perceived as an act of ‘charity’
even though they still stand to make large amounts
of profit with the grant of excess FSI, and in a
sense, ‘free land’ within the city. This makes unlikely
heroes of the agents of market forces such as
the developers and their accompanying architects,
as illustrated by an incident narrated by Hafeez
Contractor where he received a hero’s welcome
by the women of a particular project during one of
his visits after the families moved into their SRA
homes. He argued that even though they were not
provided all that was promised by the government
agencies, they were still ‘happy’ — with an improved
set of facilities — bigger windows, attached toilets,
and so on.
As a response to this, Ashok Lall questioned the
sustainability of such a model — considering that
these houses are mass-produced and essentially
standardised for maximum efficiency and profit —
and thus lead to numerous social consequences
such as the inability of the house to adapt to
changing family structures, the loss of a sense of
community, and the sheer lack of far-sightedness
in conception of these SRA schemes that have
actually led to numerous blights upon the city’s
skyline, with their often ill-conceived design and
inadequate lighting and ventilation. He goes on
domus 62 May 2017
THE
STATE OF HOUSING
IN INDIA
Architecture Foundation in collaboration with the
Urban Design Research Institute
A documentation of the inaugural seminar
to enquire whether one needs to, for long-term
sustainability, explore alternatives such as an
organic manner of restructuring existing slums
by participatory design strategies wherein local
builders, artisans and tradesmen come together
with the respective families to build houses specific
to each individual situation and requirements,
which leads to a richer social cultural environment,
a diverse urban landscape as well as tremendous
benefit to the local economy by supporting local
skills and resources.
Nuru Karim vehemently contested the notion of
the ‘free house’, questioning its logic that seems
to favour the recipients as they dwell in urban
localities that are seemingly far more ‘posh’ in his
words than are deserved by the occupants — such
as the example of his driver living in a house with
a sea view where apartments cost thousands of
rupees per square foot — something that was
resonated by Contractor outlining the nature of
taxes that these people pay.
However Shah rightfully brought the conversation
back to the nature of economics across scales
and contexts, and the necessity to set up a set of
parameters that does justice to these conditions —
as it would ensure the long-term goals of providing
a family with a ‘roof over their heads’, far removed
from schemes such as the SRA that at best, offer
a mere transient solution and will require a new set
of policies after a decade or two, that will see these
houses being demolished to make way for another
set of housing schemes — a problematic future
reality that was brought up by both Padora and Lall
in their comments.
domus 62 May 2017 CONFETTI 29

HOUSING AND
INFRASTRUCTURE

URBANISATION AFFORDABILITY PERMANENCE

SELF-BUILT URBAN LAND SLUMS

INFRASTRUCTURE ACTORS MIGRATION

COMMODITY RESILIENCE POLICY

9
30 CONFETTI
Notes on the second panel discussion
(Amita Bhide, Prasanna Desai, Pankaj Joshi and
Sheela Patel; moderated by Rahul Mehrotra)
The second session of the conference intended to
scrutinise the role of agents of delivery within the
housing ecosystem that includes the administration
and government authorities in the formation of
regulatory policies and schemes; the role of the
private sector and financial institutions; the role
of community organisations; and the role of the
law and the structuring of legal fameworks in the
dissemination of housing since Independence.
Following a set of presentations by Pankaj Joshi,
Prasanna Desai, Sheela Patel and Amita Bhide, the
questions from the audience dwelled on notions
of citizenship, the definition of informality, the
contested notions of adjacency versus dependency,
especially when one sees large segments of the
former ‘informal settlements’ being displaced
to extremely dense and ill-conceived housing
schemes on the fringes of the city, as well as the
nature of the government’s functioning – and
whether the intention of ‘de-centralisation’ has
really managed to achieve its desired aims.
Sheela Patel, in her response, described citizenship
as an ‘identity one appropriates’, which Amita
Bhide later elaborated in a manner that can be
described as some kind of ‘understanding of
2030 India 250 million
Population
the self and where one comes from’ – citing
the example of people living in villages where
everyone knows each other and one’s family’s
history, wherein notions of citizenship and thus
identity begin to acquire complex aspects of
participation, engagement and knowledge as a
member of a community. In the city, notions of
citizenship transform drastically – as within the
sudden anonymity that the city offers, in addition
to an overt dependency on government machinery
and administrative processes — one can see how
‘pieces of paper’ begin to take precedence over
the ‘self’, where the poor are increasingly excluded
from genuine processes of citizenship – as cited
in an example of a study where a street dweller is
unable to get a ration card as these are considered
to be ‘transient residents’, but an expat can get a
temporary ration card within a fortnight.
Notions of citizenship and formality begin to
be thus intertwined, as is apparent when one
discusses the regularisation of, say, housing
colonies built on forest land where one begins
to sympathise with the residents as ‘having been
duped’ and hence eligible for amnesty — whereas
a street dweller benefits from no such generosity.
Perhaps notions of the formal need to go beyond
the assumed material and manner of construction
parameters (is a fully functional mud-and-thatch
house with all the comforts of modern dwelling less
formal than a reinforced concrete?) — which also
begins to bind with a comment made by Ashok Lall
in an earlier discussion that one needs to develop
housing typologies that are ‘robust’ and can
absorb the forces of time and change, and notions
associated with it in terms of the formal/informal
binary. However, as was pointed out by both Bhide
and Patel, more often than not these legalities of
inclusion – the pieces of paper that prove your
‘citizenship’ — are actually modes of exclusion in
disguise, and qualify accessibility to government
resources and services. As such there seems to
be a game of legal and administrative jargon that
perhaps serves the purpose of vote-bank politics
at its centre that uses exclusion as a tool — as the
eviction notices for 1985 (for supposedly ‘illegal
slum dwellers’), contradictorily become ‘proof of
residence’ in 1995.
This leads one also to the ineffective nature
of policy-making and execution wherein the
intention of making governance more accessible
and capacitive by a supposed ‘de-centralisation’
of the government machinery results, again
contradictorily, in the creation of ‘fragmented
administration’ with multiple government bodies
with overlapping responsibilities, as such making
the entire execution of administration a confusing,
complicated and thus ineffective exercise. The
way out of this that one can begin to see — and
this is not a positive trend — is that instead of
streamlining existing government machinery,
one witnesses a rise in parastatal agencies, i.e.
government bodies formed with independent
powers that report directly to the administration
added to India’s population
Population of Indonesia today (roughly)
Source : India’s Urban Awakening_Mckinsey_2010; data.worldbank.org
and as such remain opaque to the people. The
‘Smart City’ initiative for one, could be an example.
However what seems most problematic is that
fact one begins to see the generalisation of
circumstances in these binaries increasingly
rampant not only in the processes of administration,
but also in schools of planning and architecture, as
Pankaj Joshi pointed out. Where one needs to see
the processes of the formal and the informal not as
parallel but intertwined in the making of a city — as
Patel later narrates of how planners are unable to
deal with the spatial realities essentially required
of the informal sector to enrich the experience of a
city — an important factor that keeps being missed
out in discourses on planning and architecture,
and where thus, the informal then is seen as this
‘unwanted and derisive’ layer; an unfortunate
labeling of what actually makes a city, and as such,
the nature of habitation.
_____
Notes on the third panel discussion
(Gautam Bhan, Swastik Harish, Sharad Mahajan,
Aromar Revi and Alpa Sheth; moderated by
Kaiwan Mehta)
The second day of the conference saw presenters
from diverse practice spaces and backgrounds
dwelling on the nature of housing typologies
within the country and the attendant questions
of design and the nature of contribution design
domus 62 May 2017
professionals can make, or should be making,
amidst the maelstrom of confusing and often
conflicting policies governing the conception
and delivery of housing, the often narrow
considerations of profit and efficiency within which
private developers operate, and the myopia that
surrounds the operation of projects under the aegis
of government agencies, as well as the challenges
of making the banking sector an integral aspect of
housing delivery.
What also can be seen is an administrative
thrust towards the ‘ownership’ of a house — as
opposed to many practices abroad wherein one
sees the profusion of rental housing typologies
and the general preference of rental housing over
ownership. Socialist democracies within mainland
Europe have managed to deal with their housing
situations through the adoption of this model
which calls for challenging and often remarkable
design strategies — as housing projects in France,
Holland, Spain, Germany and Austria among other
countries, bear witness — something that Swastik
Harish made a note of, supported by Alpa Sheth’s
vehement pro-rental stance. This throws a number
of questions on the role of how design practices
need to then reframe their positions as ‘holders
of expertise’ in a situation where there seems
to be a schism between ‘expertise’ and ‘delivery’
or ‘democratic practice’ — as noted by Gautam
Bhan in his elaboration of the rift between insular
planning agencies such as the DDA in Delhi and
the MMRDA in Mumbai, and the agents of delivery
— the respective ‘municipalities’.
What is instead the need of the hour is a
‘techno-cratic’ delivery mechanism that overcomes
the schisms to deliver an integral and synthesised
solution. This is also true of the insular nature
of ‘practices’ such as that of the planner or the
architect, that hold themselves as ‘absolute holders
of knowledge’ — and instead what becomes
paramount is to recognise knowledge systems
across other spaces of ‘informal’ practice. The
question thus, regarding the role of ‘design’ in a
situation such as ours, as was asked by a member
of the audience, seems less a problem then of
‘design’ as a field of formal activity and more the
ability to engage with the multitude of intervention
spaces available, as Bhan’s response seemed
to drive home. What this also demands is the
necessary eschewing of ‘formal’ associations with
design practices to embrace broader notions of
what practice needs to achieve or integrate — such
as embedment within a certain situation, and the
responsibility of continuity of building cultures and
building traditions. This means the assimilation of
the design professional into a broader contribution
structure that makes them into one of the actors
engaged in ‘building’, with local artisans, tradesmen,
engineers and the house owners. This also means
seeing the designer less as a ‘hallowed’ individual
but recognising design as a facilitator to achieve
broader goals.
domus 62 May 2017 CONFETTI 31

This page, and following spread: photographs

capturing the burgeoning urban development
across various sites and cities in India
32 CONFETTI domus 62 May 2017

2030 India 700 - 900 million m 2

Commercial and Residential

space to be built

Housing
(A new Chicago every year)
Source : India’s Urban Awakening_Mckinsey_2010

2012 India 18.78 million 12 million

Total housing Vacant homes
Housing

shortage in Urban India

Source : India’s Urban Awakening_ Source: firstpost.com/business/
Mckinsey_2010; data.worldbank.org 1-2-crore-vacant-homes-one-num-
ber-tells-us-wrong-indian-
real-estate-2220612.html

Aromar Revi, at this point, brings in the importance

of ‘design thinking’, a fairly recent practice
development that asks the ‘designer’ to step
outside of their frames of comfort and engage with
the real world to achieve real solutions that are
less the outcome of a designer’s ‘ego’, and more a
synthesis of the often diverse empirical constraints
to achieve a robust and pragmatic design solution
that takes into consideration the needs of the end-
user through a decisive empathetic stance.
Along with the repositioning of the ‘design
professional’ that this entails, this also seeks one
to reconsider the notion of ‘design’ as a pedagogy
first — that is manifest then within diverse
practice spaces. This also means an eschewing
of hierarchical stances and an embrace of seeing
the designer within the larger network of other
practitioners including builders, masons, etc. The
challenges thus arise out of the necessity to vet the
design and material parameters in the long-run as
well as when adaptations and alterations become
necessary, something brought up by Swastik
Harish, which demands a long-standing association
of the designer with the project in deference to
current practices.
The challenge is also the issue of scale,
where there are many examples of designers
engaging with communities to build houses in
numbers not exceeding a few hundred to a few
thousand — the challenge of translating these
successes to hundreds of thousands needs to
be addressed firmly; first is the recognition of it
as an ardent need, as Bhan notes, and then the
systematisation of it, as Revi points out, not only
within the ‘formal’ sector but most importantly
within the sector that involves traditional
building cultures and native building knowledge,
otherwise labeled as the ‘informal’.

The notes on the first three panel discussions are

prepared by Suprio Bhattacharjee.
____

Notes on the fourth panel discussion

(Gautam Chatterjee, Vidyadhar Phatak and Pranay

Vakil; moderated by Rahul Mehrotra)

The final panel discussion summarised the two-

day-long seminar in the following broad themes:
domus 62 May 2017
1. The importance of a good Development
Plan and how housing and urbanisation as
processes are closely linked to each other
and cannot be isolated.
2. The trinity of mobility which includes access,
livelihood, and land, is intrinsic to the question
of housing. We have seemingly disregarded the
connection between land markets, labour markets
and transportation.
3. There are many interesting issues at a macro
level that affect housing, such as employment and
labour markets and implications of geography on
housing solutions. The fundamental challenge
across most parts of India is how to get people
out of agriculture into other activities, and where
would such activities evolve; in the villages or in
small towns or in metropolitan centres. But given
the economy of scales of Indian cities, there is a
very strong drive to migrate to larger metropolitan
centres, or at least cities with populations of
more than a million. These conditions need to be
addressed while discussing housing in
the country.
4. Land is an asset; it has an opportunity cost. If
one really wants to deal with the problem of the
housing of the poor in the cities, state intervention
in matters concerning the land is inevitable.
Public intervention is also important for building
and extending the infrastructure. If there is an
opportunity to expand the supply of land in terms of
extending infrastructure, then half the battle is won.
This is an essential feature of the sites and services
approach, where one intervenes in land and
infrastructure and lets construction follow. Another
key to addressing housing is the idea of retrofitting;
but to conserve the housing stock, infrastructure
becomes extremely important.
5. There is an urgent need to upgrade land record-
keeping systems which may be achieved by using
technology and a digital platform.
6. Most of the housing policies in India are
imagined around Mumbai which highly limits the
implementation of policies across the geography of
the country.
7. One of the key areas is the monitoring and
evaluation of schemes, whether individual housing
schemes like the Slum Regulation Authority (SRA)
or national schemes like the Pradhan Mantri
Awas Yojana (PMAY). There is a lack of objective
evaluation and transparency.
CONFETTI 33
8. The biggest question around housing is the
role of the government and how does it fulfil its
responsibility of providing housing for all. One of
the ways would perhaps be the coming together
of the public and private sectors, where institutions
become enough robust to support
the government.
9. The state imposes unrealistic regulations which
lead to violations which in turn are directed into
fiscal instruments. This negates any incentives
for following regulations; for example, Mumbai
recovers about 6000 crores through just
condoning violations.
10. In the Seminar, there was a provocation
claiming housing as a fundamental right of the
citizen. There have been many steps forward
towards this, and there are interesting examples
across the country of significant interventions
that need to be consolidated. We need to build
a repertoire of tools and processes that can be
implemented in this context. Academic institutions,
government bodies, and individual researchers can
come together and build this knowledge bank that
becomes a good starting point for the challenge
of housing.
The notes on the fourth panel discussion are prepared
by Ela Singhal.
Extracted from The State of Housing in India — a documentation
of the inaugural seminar for the exhibition titled The State of
Housing in India, curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote
and Kaiwan Mehta, and proposed to be held in 2018 in
Mumbai. This is an initiative of the Architecture Foundation in
collaboration with the Urban Design Research Institute, and
published by Spenta Multimedia. All photographs published
here are by Robert D. Stephens.