The Fallacy of Affordable Rental Housing Package

As a part of the second tranche of ₹20 lakh crore economic stimulus package taking care of severe criticism of the central government’s sensitivity to the migrant labour fleeing the cities, a rental housing policy for the migrant workers was announced on May 14, 2020. The rental policy, much in line with the subsequent two economic stimulus packages (on agriculture and infrastructure) is medium to long term.

The rental housing package, it has been made to appear, is a government response to the heart-wrenching stories and visuals of the migrants fleeing large cities, traveling by foot, cycle or any means carrying all their belongings and their families. The stories pointed that the workers living in their factory premises or on construction sites, in many instances, were forced out of their living quarters, by their employers on closure of work. In situation of individuals renting houses were asked by their landlords to either pay rent or vacate, inspite of sermons from the Prime Minister in his first address to the nation of landlords to give moratorium on taking rent. Left with no choice the migrants living in such rental housing decided to go back to their native places.  While both situations have occurred, those not in housing distress too seem to have left for the panic created by the Covid 19 and a natural desire to be with the family in such a pandemic. Being locked down in a small house or one room house, which is what workers live, migrant or not, with limited availability of food, and no work, too left the migrant workers with no choice but wanting to go back home.

The package

There are two components of this package. One is converting the government funded housing in cities into ‘affordable rental housing complexes’ under PPP model and would be included under the existing Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) scheme. Second is central government incentivizing manufacturing units, industries and institutions to develop affordable housing complexes on their private lands for their employees, to be given on rental basis. The government funded vacant housing would be given out as ‘concessionaire’ to the private firms, so that these could be rented out to migrants on concessional rates. This means that such private firms may not have liability of returning any profit to the government, while recovering the costs of managing the units through rents collected.

The package, in simple language states that the housing built with government funds, namely that under the PMAY and presumably the former Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission’s (JNNURM’s) Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP), lying vacant will be allowed to be converted into rental units in PPP mode. This new use of the PMAY and BSUP units means that the reference is to the lower end and not the lowest end of the rental housing market. While the details are awaited, for those elated by the new announcement may have certain questions, which are being flagged below.

Whose Affordability is Being Considered?

Two phrases require to be addressed ‘government housing complexes lying vacant’ and ‘affordable housing’. The phrase government housing complex has already been explained. Phrase ‘affordable housing’ is illusionary. The entire PMAY, with exception of the In-Situ Slum Redevelopment (ISSR) component is illusionary as it is based on the concept of ‘affordable housing’. The question that has been rightly asked for the PMAY and hence for even this new ‘Affordable Rental Housing’ is; affordable for whom? Those who can spend Rs. 1,000 per month on rent (i.e. households whose income is about Rs. 5000 to Rs. 6000 per month) or Rs. 10,000 per month on rent (i.e. households whose income is about Rs. 50,000 per month), assuming that households spend 20% of their monthly income on rent. 

It is true that those at the lowest end of the urban labour market, the unskilled labour, indeed face great challenge with regards to affordable housing. There are three types of such migrants, one who cannot even rent due to extremely precarious employment conditions and irregular and low incomes and hence tend to squat. Second are those who cannot afford ownership housing and hence tend to rent, often living in shared rental accommodation. Shared accommodation is largely by single male migrants, but, we have found even families sharing a single room unit. In Mumbai, in her heydays of textile mills, the same bed-space in a room was shared by two workers, the one working in the night shift using that space in the day and vice versa. In Surat, we have seen a 100 sq ft room shared by two families, who put partition in-between for their privacy. With the increase in real estate prices, the rents keep going up, pushing the workers at the low end to share rental accommodation. 

Single male migrants sharing a rental accommodation also means that they then have to postpone or abandon the plan of bringing their respective families to the city and permanently living as temporary migrant in the city. They then do not get their permanent address changed to the city address, holding on to the address identity of their native place. In times of disasters and pandemics, then they are unable to prove their urban residency and hence be deprived of any relief measures if any. Most of such shared renting is in private formal or informal housing, wherein the owners are petty landlords, or sometimes small entrepreneurs whose income is through constructing informal housing and then renting it out. The petty landlords often have no or little income other than rent and hence they too cannot afford to forgo rent as advised by the Prime Minister during such pandemics. The entire incremental housing process in Indian cities, and in many developing country cities is such that individuals build their housing and rent out one room or so to recover the costs through rents earned, while the owner-household itself continue to stay in cramped dwelling. Is this so called new affordable rental housing being created is for those who are living in such rental accommodation? This affordable rental housing is expecting that some of such households would move to the newly designated rental housing.

Bonded Living in Employee Housing?

The third set of migrants/ workers at the low end of the labour market are the ones who live on employee provided accommodation, in the factories, on construction sites and brickkilns, etc, often in conditions similar to bonded labour. As the media reports go, some of them who have been thrown out by the employers when the factories had to be closed due to lockdown were at the mercy of their employers. In this category, there are further two kinds, one who live on their work sites, (factory, construction site, etc) and not paying any rent for the accommodation; there are others whose employees have rented accommodation and put the workers in them (in here workers may pay partial rent). When the employers provide accommodation in any of these forms, because they want stability of labour supply, it is beneficial to the workers. But, then, the workers are also tied to this employer and are forced to work at whatever wage rate the employer pays. Long time back, organiser of the workers in ceramic factory in Ahmedabad was looking for liberating the workers from the low-wage conditions of working. These workers were living in employer-provided housing and felt that they were bonded to the employer through housing. 

The employer provided housing can become an option for those who have bargaining power with their employers or have protection of law from the exploitation by the employers. The workers at the lower end of the labour market, and the migrant labour do not have such bargaining powers, as evident from them fleeing the cities in the Covid 19 pandemic.

In response to a French politician and philosopher proposed converting tenants’ rents into purchase payments on their dwellings, arguing that it would end the exploitative relations between landlords and tenants and transform the property-less poor property owners, Friedrich Engels, in ‘The Housing Question’ that there was no such thing as a housing crisis. Engels who was deeply aware of the housing misery of the working class, as described at great length in his work ‘Conditions of working class in England’ (Engels 1845). Engels argued that the miserable living conditions of the workers was a crisis of capitalism in which housing conditions formed just ‘one of the innumerable smaller, secondary evils’ caused by the exploitation of workers by capital (Engels, 1872). He argued that the misery of tenants was because they were workers and not because they were tenants. Then Engels argued for abolition of capitalism! 

But, even if we do not reach this conclusion, the employer provided housing would lead to ameliorative living and working conditions of the workers, migrant or not, only if the workers have a better bargaining power, which is not so today in the conditions of surplus labour.

Vacant Public Housing?

The third question is: “are there vacant public housing units and if yes then why?” One can think of only two possibilities, if the BSUP housing constructed under the JNNURM or the units constructed under the ongoing PMAY are vacant. As per the last available data, vacant BSUP units were only in Delhi and not in other cities.  Under the PMAY’s four verticals (for details see http://mohua.gov.in/cms/pradhan-mantri-awas-yojana.php) only two the Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme (CLSS) and Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP) entails houses constructed for those who are eligible for either 3% interest subsidy on housing loan interest rate or a direct subsidy to the builders respectively. In these projects, subsidy is given to only those clients who are eligible based on an income or dwelling-unit size criteria. In such housing schemes, there may be client households who may not have benefitted form the subsidy under PMAY if their incomes are higher than the qualifying ceiling. It is thus not clear as to which vacant public housing is being referred to.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) website states that total of 97.48 lakh housing units are either under construction (64.02 lakh) or have been completed (33.46 lakh) since 2014 under the PMAY (file:///D:/Darshini%20Documents/Urban/PMAY/4(27).pdf) as on April 20, 2020. The MoHUA website does not give the breakup, but, in 2017-18, the CLSS and AHP components together formed 40% of the total housing units. This would mean that about 39 lakhs of the total 97.48 lakh housing units under the PMAY could be considered as forming part of the vacant public housing stock. There were 134 lakh households living in slums in urban India as per 2011 population census. Thus, the PMAY has not reached all the slum households and even if half of them would like to move to new housing under the CLSS and AHP components, the supply will fall short of need. In such a situation, why is there vacant public housing? The only answer to that is because the prices of the CLSS and AHP housing components is higher than the affordability of those living in slums. Claiming that there are vacant public housing units, is an admission of the failure of the PMAY!

In Conclusion

The question is that if the ‘Affordable Rental Housing’ is being seen as an economic revival package after the Covid 19 pandemic then there are two questions: (i) whose revival is being talked about and (ii) would it benefit the distressed migrants walking / cycling back to their native places and whose housing rights have been discussed by the NGOs working with the migrant labour, construction labour and seasonal migrants (these are not mutually exclusive categories)? The revival package is for those whose businesses in the real estate construction and management have suffered. Whether the workers will benefit or not will depend on the rents charged under ‘affordable rental scheme’ and what protection the workers get from the government under employee-housing. However, one thing is clear, there is no additional money for rental housing or what government would like to call ‘affordable rental housing’. It is Rs. 1,400 crores allocated in the Union Budget of Financial Year 2020-21.

Urban Planning in Times of Pandemics

Would we learn anything from the ongoing Covid – 19 pandemic with regards to inclusion of migrants in our cities, public health infrastructure and policies and most importantly with regards to planning our cities? Answer to that is NO. I would focus in this piece on urban planning and pandemics, as many have written about the other issues. Also, urban planning as a practice and profession is a baby of various pandemics. This is too early an issue to discuss. But, discussion is required as it is a very important aspect of preventing pandemics. An article in Wire discussed about how population density in Dharavi slum is 50 times that of Wuhan and hence the question is in such conditions of our cities, which is largely an outcome of our very poor urban planning practice, can even future pandemics be prevented?

When (the cynics would say if) the Covid – 19 virus pandemic would decline in India, a hard look at the model of urbanisation and urban planning would become necessary. The possibility of the pandemic ending too soon and upcoming heat period reducing the possibility of the viruses spreading have been ruled out by many international researches. Thus, if India is aspiring to urbanise fast, believe in the theory that urbanisation is central to economic growth - notwithstanding the fact that the economic growth itself at this moment in India’s history due to many misadventures particularly in last half a decade seems illusionary – the urbanisation and urban planning model of India need to be relooked at.

At the heart of any urbanisation process is migration. Faster the process of migration, faster is the process of urbanisation. Media in the times of the Covid – 19 pandemic has described many aspects of how India has treated her migrants. It is going to take a long time before the migrant workers would come out of the shock induced by this pandemic. The macro-economic misadventures of the last half a decade on top of jobless growth setting in during the UPA regime had led to further employment crises, which is largely borne by the migrant workers. Whether India’s urbanisation is going to happen is a serious issue.

But, more serious is how degraded our Indian cities are, barring a few prestigious locales inhabited by the elites.  Monobina Gupta write in Wire on April 1, 2020 (https://thewire.in/rights/coronavirus-lockdown-inequality-poor-smart-cities) as to how much Indian cities have excluded the poor. The stories of urban dystopias have been reported by numerous researches of Indian cities, including from the writings of this author. But, particularly in the last half a decade, these stories have fallen on deaf ears. In the earlier period (from 2005 to 2014) during the JNNURM times, these stories were heard, but the response was a lip-service, big programmes announced but many of these were designed to be implemented within the ‘neo-liberal’ policy paradigm. For the want of any better term, I have used the term ‘neo-liberal’, given that we were not liberal in political or economic sense nor were we welfarist in particularly urban settings.

Urban Planning History

Charles Dickens descriptions of cities in times of fast pace of urbanisation in the British cities has given us the epithet Dickensian cities. The British cities and then followed by other European cities, moved to improve the living conditions in the cities by putting in underground services such as underground ducts for water supply and drainage. Science and Industry Museum in Manchester City has a section on the expansion of drainage network in the city. Interestingly, they make us walk through these drains (Photo 1). This was what city development was all about, application of technology for public health.

Photo 1: Exhibit of toilets and drains, Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK

Realising the cities to be vulnerable to such public health crises, urban planning as a profession came in, with firstly setting up of, what were aptly called, the Improvement Trusts. Indian cities too set up the Improvement Trusts in the period starting from 1915 when Patrick Geddes visited India.

One reaction to the Dickensian cities was a movement ‘anti-urbanism’, starting with Ebenezer Howard, who came up with Garden Cities concept (Figure 1), envisaging a city with a countryside imprint; residential areas that are green, with each house having a front and a backyard, industries located nearby to which workers went to work, and self-sufficient cities. Fredrick Engels called this rural idiocy. Other such ideas that became popular were of well-known architects, Le Corbusier (Radiant City) (Figure 2) and Frank Lloyd Wright (Broadacre City) (Figure 3), all displaying the confidence of an architect who considered himself as Master of the City, creating a Master Vision and then a Master Plan. This fantasising was very much in tune with the arrogance of Modernism, of ability to control the fate of the humanity. The Master architects thought that the people and cities would behave as they had ordered them to. Much like our current rulers thinking that the people would behave and remain under lockdown; but what we saw was sea of people on streets of Delhi and other cities! The cities and the people did not behave as the architects thought. The Garden city did not happen because it meant diversion of large tracts of land for green purposes when the lands were privately owned and purchasing land parcels for a house with a yard was beyond the affordability of the industrial workers. Garden cities did not happen, the Dickensian cities did. The Dickensian cities were improved by putting in drainage and water supply lines, largely through state funding and not through the plans that were prepared by the architects.

Figure 1: Garden City

Figure 2: Radiant City

Figure 3: Broadacre City

But, at independence, we in India, while continuing with the activities of the Improvement Trusts, by then set up in most large cities, decided to take this Utopian leap, by inviting Le Corbusier and Otto Königsberger to plan Indian cities. Prior to that, Lutyen’s Delhi was planning by the British Colonialists in a grand manner, with wide roads, utopian style houses with yards, and large many green spaces to house the colonial rulers. The Lutyen’s Delhi was very much an imprint of the paradigm of urban planning existing then. But, this Lutyen’s Delhi or Corbusier’s Chandigarh did not get replicated anywhere else in India, although attempts were made. But, there was always another city outside such planned city to accommodate the working class.

The idea of utopian plans changed to Master Planning that came with heavy regulatory framework. These are statutory plans, which each city has made. More often than not, the Indian urban reality is missed out in these plans, creating the dystopian reality, of the poor, the migrants and the invisible. 

The Neo-liberal City Planning
The regulatory framework not having worked, its critics from the right, at global and the national level, started campaigning for ‘market-based planning’ whatever it meant. In simple terms, it meant, allocation of use of a land as per the market principle, that is the best land available to the highest bidder, in our case the commercial uses and high-end residences, and creating a class of speculative real developers and thus speculative capital. 

The poor have been pushed to the ghettos on the periphery (Figure 4 showing peripheralization of low-income housing through Affordable Housing Zone), with the precarious living conditions that the migrants are escaping now from – no security in rental housing, employers throwing them out in case of employee housing in the industries and on construction site, and so on. After all, these workers living in cheek-by-jowl conditions would create ‘hot-spot’ of virus! (Photos 2 & 3, Madanpur Khadar). There will be no way out of the impacts of this and future pandemics if such living conditions of the urban working class, the migrants and the non-migrants, is not going to change. Rightly, the finding of cases in Dharavi is a matter of grave concern. Dharavi, housing somewhere between 700,000 to a million population has estimated population density of 270,000 people per square km. There is no chance if Covid – 19 spreads here. There is no chance for population living here to be not affected but even the city of Mumbai would be spared as Dharavi is also a place of production of many everyday use food items, even healthcare items such as IV fluid bottles and sutures, etc.  The urban planning has to address improving these living conditions, the existing urban dystopias.

Figure 4: Peripheralisation of Affordable Housing

Photo 2: Cramped Living, Madanpur Khadar Resettlement Site, Delhi

Photo 3: Water Shortage, Madanpur Khadar, Delhi

Instead, the urban planning, proceeding on the market-based route for the common people, is continuing to create these dystopias. Ironically, these market-based solutions is not for the rulers. The current ruling king of India, intending to create a cult following, is now wanting to alter the spaces of colonial power. The project to redevelop Central Vista in Delhi has been approved by the Council of Ministers in the times of Covid – 19 outbreak, one day before the Janata curfew imposed on March 22, 2020 that then resulted in 21 day lockdown two days later. It is indeed urban planning amidst a pandemic! This project has proceeded with violating the principles of transparent bidding in a market economy (https://thewire.in/rights/central-vista-redevelopment-seminar). Neo-liberalism has been selling the idea of fair practices of bidding, but, not put in place in the case of Central Vista. So, we have a system of neo-liberalism in urban development for common people with autocratic and non-transparent decision-making by the rulers when it comes to creation of their personal legacy.

Low allocations in Union Budget for Urban Programmes
The Central Vista project has been allocated Rs. 20,000 crores. The allocations in the Budget of 2020-21 for other central government urban development projects is as in Table 1. The total budgetary provision of Rs. 50,000 crores has about Rs. 21,000 crores for capital projects across India for about 500 million people, while Rs. 20,000 crores for personal legacy and to house about 70,000 employees of the central government ((https://thewire.in/rights/central-vista-redevelopment-seminar). Of the Rs. 21,000 crores, about 80% is for metros. Claims on the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) site about investments in these programmes is way higher than these numbers because it is wishful thinking of contributing funds coming from the state governments. A clever ploy of claiming credit while forcing the state government to pay for the programmes, much as the relief package that has come to deal with fallout of Covid – 19.


Table: Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs Budget 2020-21

Item	Rs. crores
Total Budget of MoHUA	50,040
-  Revenue side	28,891
-  Capital side	21,149
All Metro Projects (capital side)	17,482
PMAY (Revenue side)	8,000
Ajeevika Mission	795
AMRUT	7,300
Smart Cities Mission	6,450
Swachh Bharat Mission	2,300
HRIDAY	0

Source: https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/expenditure_budget.php

Thus, it is neo-liberalism for the urban residents including the poor and the migrants creating dystopias and utopian planning for the ruler. Do we think, in such an urban planning and policy regime will help in preventive measures against pandemics in the future? The answer is clear no.