Chapter 5: Affordable Housing and Housing Amenities for India's Poor

The development discourse evidently documented that public housing development efforts have been dated back to post-independence and partisan periods of the country, with an immediate challenge of rehabilitation of refugees in different parts of the country. Village Housing Programme was introduced in 1957 mainly to provide housing assistance in the form of loans up to Rs. 5,000 per unit to individuals and to cooperatives. This programme lasts long for 22 years up to 1979 and assisted to over 65,000 housing units. In between, the House Sites-Cum-Construction Assistance Scheme (HSCAS) introduced in 1974 as a central assistance was transferred to state sector in 1975. Further, a specific emphasis was laid on the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe and freed-bonded labourers families under the two-wage employment programmes – National Rural Employment Programme and Rural Landless Employment Guarantee (RLEGP) from 1980 and 1983, respectively. But a major impetus was started from 1985 with the introduction of a full-fledged rural housing programme – Indira Awaas Yojana (IAY) exclusively for SCs, STs and Freed Bonded Labourers as a sub-sector of RLEGP. An exclusive earmarking of funds of 6 per cent was done in 1989 under Jawahar Rojgar Yojana (JRY) for these sections. However, the scope of the scheme was broadened in 1994 to cover Non-SC/ST families by increasing the earmarked funds for housing to 10 per cent under JRY. Another landmark in rural housing was making IAY an independent scheme in 1996, to meet the housing needs of the Below Poverty Line (BPL) households. Undoubtedly, the schematic interventions for more than six and half decades have been only ad hoc in nature and have brought only fringe benefits to the rural housing sector. The reasons associated with the very poor performance were non-assessment of housing shortage across cross sections, low quality design with inadequate construction assistance, non-convergence of the housing amenities, lack of push–pull factors, lack of effective supervision and host of others have limited the success in rural segment. Above all, complete relegation of the rural housing investment priority by the then national governments during the 40 years of first seven 5 years plans (1951–1991), as depicted in Table 13. The availability of the public resources and public investment were almost nil, which was a pathetic situation as if the countryside does not belong to India. Instead the whole focus was on development of housing in the urban segment by earmarking almost entire public resources and investment. It must be noted that in 40 years of the plans period (I–VII) including the annual plans, India’s housing development has been earmarked a public investment of Rs 55,927 crores, of which only Rs 1,062 crores was earmarked for rural housing development. It works out to only 1.90 per cent of the total resources, which only reflects on the complete neglect of the countryside and development deprivation by the public policies (Mahadeva, 1996). Especially, the first 30 years of planned development was a complete disarray, although the situation was situation comparatively better in the Sixth and Seventh Five-year plans period. With only Rs 11,480 crores earmarked for housing development in the country for 30 years, in real term it was only a little above 20 per cent. Much against this overall disappointing reality, rural housing could see an investment of Rs 133.10 crores or 12.53 per cent in this period of investment starvation. The average rural housing investment was in the order of marginally just above 1 per cent. However, the investment revival was taken place from the period 1981–1991 with the Sixth and Seventh Five-year plans, which have earmarked path breaking and considerable resources for the housing development in the country. Although the plan resources were substantially increased for housing to Rs 44,447 crores or 79 per cent of the total, the rural housing had seen a total allocation of Rs 929 crores, which was only 2.27 per cent average during the Sixth and Seventh Five-Year Plans.