‘Brexiting’
has many explanations, one of them being a housing crisis amidst many other
ills of globalization, felt across England including in London. As Pratap Bhanu
Mehta states (Indian Express June 25, 2016), “if this is a revolt against
globalisation, then this vote should be read, above all, as a vote against the
city of London which has come to epitomise open immigration, financialisation
of the economy, elites that are out of touch, a home for crony capitalism
driven by real estate speculation ….”.
The signs
were there of disaffection in the housing market even in London. The Housing
and Planning Act, 2016, which when introduced as a bill in 2015, invited huge
protests particularly from those who could live in London due to Council
Housing (social housing), that was available on rental basis. The bill, now an
act, sought to sell off council housing to the occupants through provision of
Right to Buy, which meant that those who cannot buy had to leave main parts of
London to live in suburbs, which was already happening.
The city of
London was also demolishing council housing for high-end real estate projects
that were extremely expensive. Anna Minton writes in the Guardian on April 20,
2016 that the cheapest one-bedroom apartment in Elephant Park development on
former council housing at Heygate Estate in South London would cost £608,000,
absolutely unaffordable to large segments of population. And a quarter of it
was to supposedly ‘affordable housing’, to be made available at 80% of the
market rent! Affordable housing has become euphemism for incremental
privatization in housing, promoting paradigm of ownership housing. A large
segment of population prefer to live in rental housing as they cannot afford
ownership housing and the Housing and Planning Act, 2016, did not have anything
for them.
‘Affordable
Housing 2022’ named now as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) too is promoting
ownership housing when only 61% of urban households have ownership housing and
35% live in rental housing as per the 69th Round of National Sample
Survey data (of 2012) in India. In an urbanizing economy, when continuous rural
to urban migration is expected, housing programme should be addressing needs
for both, rental as well as ownership housing. In particular, public housing,
as Britain and other European countries’ experience shows, is rental, with rent
subsidy paid to the housing corporation (developer) directly by the government.
The PMAY
has two important components, one in-situ slum rehabilitation (ISSR) through
private sector participation using land as a resource and second Affordable
Housing in Partnership (AHP). The ISSR is the new name of the famous (or
infamous) Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) introduced in Mumbai in 1995. Since
1995, 0.33 million dwelling units (29% of the total slum dwelling households of
2011) have been sanctioned (upto 2014 August) in the city under the SRS and
none after the announcement of the ISSR under the PMAY. Only 82,000 units have
been completed making SRS tenements available to only 7% of the households
living in slums.
In
Ahmedabad, SRS has been approved in only 12 of the total 834 slums in city.
Ahmedabad’s SRS scheme was announced after Gujarat “The Regulation for the
Rehabilitation and Redevelopment of the Slums 2010”. After the ISSR, about
30,000 dwelling units have been sanctioned in Gujarat under ISSR, which would
be about 8% of the total slum households enumerated in 2011 population census
in the state. At all India level, just 41,200 dwelling units under ISSR have
been sanctioned, which will reach 0.3% of the total slum dwelling households in
urban India. The numbers are so low because the SRS is viable only in the
locations where the land prices are very high as private sector does not step
in without certain minimum assured margin of profit. The former SRS and now the
ISSR has not been successful because of it is its total dependence on the
private sector to deliver what in other context could have been called ‘social
housing’. The Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY), which now has discontinued, had various
options available for slum redevelopment and not just SRS, and had possibility
of success except for its unnatural death on the change of national government
in 2014 May.
The
Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP) is private sector led construction of
new houses for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), defined as those whose
annual household income is Rs 3 lakhs or below. Total of about 423,000 dwelling
units have been sanctioned across India and which would reach only 3% of those
currently living in slum housing. But, the AHP housing is expensive, costing
any price between Rs. 7.5 lakhs to Rs. 10 lakhs and this would require the
household to pay Rs. 7,000 to Rs. 9,500 monthly instalment for a loan of 15
years, that is 30% to 40% of their income. This is absurd and hence unworkable.
Besides,
the AHP is being development in Affordable Housing belt, which, in case of
Ahmedabad is outside the city’s third ring road, about 15 to 20 kms from the
city centre. The housing constructed under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban
Renewal Mission (JNNURM), BSUP (Basic Services for the Urban Poor) component, which
had large subsidy, was constructed way outside the city and did not have
takers. Only 78% of BSUP housing units are occupied as of mid-2016. Peripheral
inaccessible location away from livelihood opportunities is the major reason
for such high vacancy rate in the BSUP housing.
Has PMAY
learnt anything from the past? Have we as a nation learnt anything from the
past? Have we learnt anything from the housing protests and discussions in
other countries or not? Nothing. It is the same rhetoric of ‘Affordable
Housing’ seen in Britain, the cause of great disaffection leading to Brexit. The
ISSR is euphemism for handing over prime lands of the city to the real estate
sector, what can be called speculative capitalism. AHP is a way of diverting
the subsidies to the builders in the name of the poor, again fuelling
speculative capitalism. It is, probably conveniently, forgotten that the cities
will not be looking smart without adequate housing for the poor? The subject of
‘Smart Cities’ will be handled in another article but currently both the
slogans, Smart Cities and Affordable Housing sound like a Theater of absurd.
