Adequate and proper housing is not just an infrastructure issue. It is the core of safe and healthy development of communities and particularly of children and youth.

The housing shortage in India is enormous. According to one estimate (Indiabulls Securities), by 2014, 25 million homes are projected to be required to meet existing housing needs in rural areas and over 20 million are required in urban areas. Vast majority of these homes are needed by households in the economically weaker sections (EWS) and lower income group (LIG).

“India is witnessing increasing levels of urban population. Nearly 28% of the country’s urban population lives in cities and urban areas – double the level of population at the time of independence in 1947 and it is expected to rise to 40% by 2020.

“Poverty, the sheer scale of population growth and the huge rates of urbanization, as people move from the countryside into the cities, will add to the housing shortages.

“Faced with the prospect of housing that the poor cannot either afford or access in formal housing markets, millions of households around the world turn instead to the ‘informal’ sector, resulting in slums having become an inevitable part of the Indian metropolis landscape.

“Given the magnitude of the housing shortage and budgetary constraints of both the central and state Governments, it is clear that public sector efforts will not suffice in fulfilling the housing demand.

“While it is the Government’s endeavor to encourage multiple stake-holders namely, the private sector, the cooperative sector, the industrial sector for labor housing and the services/institutional sector for employee housing, these players have not been forthcoming to take the lead and share the burden of developing houses for the poor. The Government is seeking to promote various types of public-private partnerships for realizing the goal of ‘affordable housing for all’. But for this to work, the Government will need to provide an enabling environment and the right kind of incentives and subsidies to the right target audience, so as to maximize the amount of housing that can be generated with least amount of Government funding.

“Central and state Governments are acting on recommendations laid down by various committees and taking necessary steps to increase housing supply...”-

- From the Executive Summary, Making Affordable Housing Work in India, RICS Research Report, November 2010.