This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal and Anand Vardhan are joined by urban geographer and researcher Rashee Mehra to discuss Delhi's continuing housing crisis.
Rashee traces the problem to a structural failure in planning. Using the example of Satya Niketan, a “regularised JJ colony”, she explains how a neighbourhood can be made legal while the construction within it remains unauthorised. “It is actually a very confusing governance structure that we have created in the city,” she says, pointing to the overlapping jurisdictions of the central government, state government and municipal bodies. “That leads to questions of whose responsibility it is.”
She argues that Delhi’s housing problem cannot be reduced to a question of illegal construction alone. “Housing has to be adequate, affordable, viable, sustainable. Where housing is affordable, it’s not adequate, and where housing is adequate, it’s not affordable. And that’s your catch-22 kind of situation.”
Anand adds that the crisis extends well beyond university students. He notes that landlords in the city fall into two categories: “One who has made investments in these houses, and one who is living on the rent only... they have less incentive to invest because all the rent that they get, they spend somewhere.”
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