News reports that India’s property market has revived to pre-pandemic levels haven’t been given sufficient publicity. According to Knight Frank, an internationally respected real estate consultancy firm, in the July-September quarter, 12.5 million sq. ft of office space and 64,000 homes were sold. Although ex facie, these numbers are impressive, the residential units sold in particular, meet a fraction of the pent up demand for affordable housing countrywide. According to an Observer Research Foundation 2019 study, 63.67 million urban and rural families — over 25 percent of the total number — don’t have adequate housing. Neglect of the housing sector is most visible in urban India. Citing 2012 data, the study says that in urban India 15 million homes (out of 18.78 million) are over-crowded and need to be replaced.
The stark truth is that during the past seven decades, a private builder-politician-bureaucrat mafia has flourished countrywide. Under the guise of protecting rural citizens from urban real estate developers, this mafia engineered an artificial shortage of land for housing development projects. For instance, until very recently rural land could only be sold or leased to rural land owners. Moreover in urban India, stringent rent control laws were enacted destroying the rental property market. More shockingly, long-term housing loans, aka mortgages — almost a fundamental right in all developed countries of newly-married couples — were prohibited. The country’s major banks — nationalised in the public interest in 1969 — started dispensing housing loans only in the mid-1990s.
Evidently, someone high up from the establishment took the decision to deny housing finance and/or build affordable government housing for the masses in Singapore and China style. Curiously, none of the hundreds of babus and media stars flooding the market with their shallow memoirs has shed light on this great injustice which immiserised an entire generation of midnight’s children by denying them half-decent roofs over their heads.
