People & Their Problems

New Delhi, 2 February 2018

                                                           Homelessness Challenge

REPRIEVE FOR SLUM DWELLERS

By Moin Qazi

A revolutionary step has been taken giving hope to millions of slum dwellers across the country.

The National Capital Territory of Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Second (Amendment) Act, 2017 which extends time till December 31, 2020 for protection of slums and unauthorised colonies from eviction in the national capital region, got President Kovind’s assent. This law amends the earlier law under which the immunity ended on December 31, 2017.

One of the most challenging problems of our times is homelessness. While we continue to record improvements in dealing with poverty, homelessness has been plagued with myopic responses from policy pundits. The apathetic approach of successive governments is symptomatic of the disease that ails India’s housing system.

Housing is often the bedrock of other development interventions: owning land boosts health profiles, educational outcomes and gender equality. Decent housing is a rising tide that lifts all boats. The converse is equally true. India’s slums are horribly chaotic and sickening. Inmates live in cramped shacks made of rotting wood with rickety corrugated roofs. They are not only visual eyesores but also emblems of raw inequality.

Every day, more and more families find themselves in a struggle to keep a decent roof over their heads. There are millions of low-income families who live in overcrowded, inadequate and unsafe shacks made of rotting wood and corrugated steel, crammed between dusty paths and open sewers with virtually no sanitation, environmental risk factors and lack of even the barest infrastructure. They experience exclusion, evictions, discrimination, insecure tenure, and lack of hope of accessing adequate and affordable housing in their lifetimes.

The 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 in India are homeless.

India is urbanising fast. Around 38 per cent of India will be urbanised by 2025. This would mean that some 540 million people will be living in urban areas by the said year. Experts estimate that 18 million households in India are in need of low-income housing. This, paired with a shrinking supply of land and high construction costs, is leading to a growing slum population. It is also estimated that by 2025, more than 42 per cent of India’s population will be urban.

Providing stable and affordable housing is first major step towards establishing and sustaining a basic standard of living for every household. Several attempts to relocate slum dwellers to the city’s fringes have gone in vain because the location restricts the residents’ access to employment, schools and other amenities. Slum-dwellers prefer upgradation of existing facilities and secure tenancy. Evictions from slums and demolition of settlements have risen, as cities expand and are brought under programmes that aim to create centres similar to those in western countries.

House prices have been stretching further and further away from normal wages, making it difficult for low income families to get on the housing ladder. Faced with the enormity of the housing need and financial weakness of those in need, the government builds low-income housing units and distributes these, at very high levels of subsidy. With no clear definition and a lot of fudging, anything is possible. So we get a plethora of “low-cost” home schemes with ambiguous rules for entitlement. Due to the high proportion of subsidy, only a few such units are built.

The housing units are usually attractive to members of the middle class, who often maneuver the eligibility rules and succeed in displacing the intended beneficiaries. We need a mass programme of social house building if we have to relieve the congestion of the homeless. Or still better, we should work on modest step-by-step upgrades to slums in partnership with residents replacing precarious cardboard or tin shanties with larger and higher-quality constructions.

The policy solutions can be loosely labelled; the government should improve the legal and regulatory environment and increase the supply of affordable, legal shelter with tenure security and access to basic services and amenities. The State should undertake physical upgradation of informal settlements, which can be accompanied by the provision of public services such as access to roads, electricity, water supply and sanitation. These services create a high level of perceived tenure security without a formal change of the legal status and have encouraged local improvements and investment.

The social consultancy firm Facility Solutions Group (FSG) says that up to 37 million households -- a quarter of India’s urban population -- lives in informal housing, including slums. It recommends giving them basic property rights. The report argues that this would encourage residents to invest in home improvement and encourage municipalities to provide infrastructure and better services. The research specifically focuses on owner-occupants, those who don’t pay rent and are not investing in improving their homes because of fear of eviction.

There are various categories of slums in India: unidentified, identified, recognised, notified and unauthorised housing. The report divides informal housing into three segments: insecure housing (unidentified slums) where people have no property rights and are most vulnerable to eviction; transitional housing (recognized slums and identified slums) which exist in government records and are gaining de facto rights; secure housing (notified slums and unauthorised housing) where people have some property rights and can’t be evicted summarily. In India, slums classified as “unobjectionable” are eligible to be upgraded. These are in non-residential zones, on low-lying lands, or where roads and other public infrastructure have been proposed.

The entire low-income housing ecosystem depends upon two things working together. There is a need for both the supply of housing -- builders who have to build for this segment -- and financiers, who help the demand side. Both of these considerations need to work in tandem.

Endowing slum dwellers with mortgageable titles can open the gates to numerous opportunities for improving health, education, employment and providing entitlements to social programmes. The policy pundits and legislators are finally waking up to the seriousness of the issue. Odisha government recently took a revolutionary decision by providing urban poor residing in 3,000 slums land rights for residential use that are heritable, mortgageable and non-transferable.

The stresses on account of homelessness are mounting and India must summon the will and act fast. Solutions will come from pairing passion with entrepreneurship and digging deep into the challenge at hand. We increasingly have the tools; but we need to summon the will and think out of the box. And don’t accept limits to how the world works. –INFA

(Copyright, India News & Feature Alliance)