Chapter 4: Good Governance and Inclusive Housing Policy

The development approach of the Government of India since 2007 has been officially pronounced as the period of ‘inclusive growth’ from the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007–2012). Since then, the country has implemented 10 five-year plans from 1950 to 2007 successfully. The main premise of the inclusive growth strategies has been to identify the hitherto neglected, excluded sections of the population, sectors and to give additional impetus to pull them on to the growth path besides include them to the mainstream development agenda of the country. The necessary road maps of the development and strategies have been clearly explained in the Eleventh Plan document (Planning Commission, 2008) in order to achieve this end. India’s housing sector, having been neglected so long in the development agenda, was beset with lack of public understanding, lack of the public policy and lack of the financing system for more than three and half decades of the independence and of the development planning. In the absence of the national commitment for the housing development, the hallmark has been the ad hoc approaches during this period coupled with host of government funded social housing scheme targeting different sections, which could not bring major changes due to limited funding. If this was the overall national scenario, the position of the country side has been even worse, as rural housing is still neglected segment within the sector. Missing housing development priority and continued apathy of the housing finance system towards the rural areas are the features of the economy. However, the sector has witnessed two turning points from mid-1980s (1987). A national housing policy was designed for the first time, which facilitated housing development mainly in the urban areas (GoI, 1994), across different sections envisaging housing norms, supply of land, slums and urban poor housing, housing finance and infrastructure, special programmes for disadvantaged sections and so on. Similarly, promotion of housing finance system, consisting of nationalised scheduled commercial banks (SCBs), housing finance companies, housing cooperatives, private sector banks, etc., was another milestone in the development administration.