Sreelatha Menon: Housing with a conscience

EAR TO THE GROUND

India needs to emulate countries like Singapore and Canada in a big way to meet its goal of providing housing to all.

Meena lives in a one-room house at an East Delhi resettlement colony, surrounded by open drains and stench, and with no toilet. She comes to a nearby housing society and spends all day sitting under a tree on the pavement, working in houses for barely an hour or two.

Her two daughters go to a nearby flat after school and help with cooking. They are free to stay there till night, away from their dingy hut, and its queues before the water tap and the public toilet.

The various states of India do not guarantee a house to citizens even on rent.

Had Meena been a Singaporean or a Canadian, she would have been better off. Under Singapore's social housing system, she would have been living in a single room flat, paying Rs 600 a month, while you, with a better income of say Rs 32,000 a month, would be paying a rent of Rs 3,000. You would not be paying three-fourths of your income towards home loan instalments. Instead, you would be spending money on hiring a gymnastics coach for your daughter. Meena also could have considered starting a small enterprise.

Some 85 per cent of Singapore's 3.2 million resident population lives in public housing or rented housing, paying rents to the government.

In Canada, more than 8,50,000 housing units in 23 new towns have been constructed under its social housing policy. In Ontario, non-profit housing co-operatives are undertaking social housing along with the city government.

This is unlike India which does not look at housing as a long term need requiring a long term solution. It has a knee jerk response to it and reacts in small schemes and projects, more to clear encroachments and reclaim land than to find housing for all.

What is the latest? It has spent Rs 10,500 crore so far in two years for slum housing under the Jawahar Lal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNURM) in some of the 63 cities covered by it. This is for projects providing houses to people in slums and providing drains and other facilities there.

But how many houses can the government buy for the people coming to cities almost daily? Rented housing is far from its thoughts. It seems to think of people as permanent residents, whereas populations in cities are floating. In Mumbai, JNURM is promoting the Dharavi redevelopment plan under which the slum dwellers are to get permanent houses, while the rest of the prime land would go to the private builder. So the government and builder profit, while a handful of slum dwellers get houses. Does that prevent another Dharavi?

A faint ray of hope is the fact that the central government has now begun to talk of social housing. It is even looking at social housing models like the acclaimed one in Singapore. It is being promoted quietly by Kumari Selja, who heads the poverty alleviation ministry, which is the other arm of the urban development ministry. Parwanoo in Himachal Pradesh and Bangalore are in talks with the ministry for social housing projects. But these are exceptions.

When cities like Delhi and Mumbai try to emulate Singapore and Bangkok, it is the flyovers that catch their sights, not their long term solutions for housing. Such myopic vision is a sure recipe for no development, because for a country with half its population living in squalid ghettos, excellence in education, health research or sports or anything for that matter is a distant dream.