Report Title - Housing Needs of the Urban Poor in Nagpur
Report Subtitle - Assessing the Applicability of the PMAY, Housing for All Mission
Study Partners - YUVA (Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action) and Tata Trusts
Authors - Nitin Meshram, Marina Joseph, Doel Jaikishen, Brishti Banerjee and Sayali Marawar
Field Research - Staff at YUVA and IHF
Publication Date - November 2018
Link - Click Here for the Report
ABSTRACT
In 2017, Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) partnered with Indian Housing Federation (IHF) to conduct a quantitative study of 3,000+ households in nine notified and five non-notified slums in Nagpur, the third largest city in Maharashtra. The aim of this study was to understand housing needs in the city for informing housing provision in the context of the “Housing for All” Mission and the land titling (malki patta) initiatives of the local government.
‘Housing for All’ as a concept promotes access to adequate shelter for every person. This includes a variety of housing options across contexts - shelter for the homeless, housing upgradation, provisioning of tenure security, protection against forced evictions, slum notification, provisioning of basic services and infrastructure, land reservation for housing and developing new housing stock, among others.
This report, prepared jointly by YUVA and IHF with the support of Tata Trusts, brings to light the demand side of housing and juxtaposes it with supply side criteria under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). Further, it assesses these findings against land regulations and recent efforts at providing land titles to slum residents in the city. The report draws correlations between socio-economic profiles of residents, slum status (notified or non-notified) and their housing needs.
The data reveals important trends in housing needs and aspirations. Most of the sampled households were headed by daily-wage workers belonging to the economically weaker section (EWS) income category. When asked about their housing aspirations, a stark 91 per cent demanded housing upgradation and only 9 per cent demanded new housing. Of those who preferred upgradation, more than 78 per cent have been living in the same settlement for over 25 years. Among those who preferred new housing, 60 per cent began living in these settlements over the last seven years and 99 percent were currently living on rent.
The report finds a glaring disconnect between ideas of housing supply and people’s access to such housing, by mapping people’s housing needs and aspirations to the following PMAY criteria: i) tenability, ii) land ownership, iii) state government determined cut-off dates, iv) ownership of a house elsewhere in India, v) possession of legal identity documents, vi) income and financial capabilities and vii) size of the house.
The major findings of the study are:
Majority of the surveyed households in notified slums that are presumed to be ‘tenable’ demanded for upgradation of their existing homes.
None of the surveyed households had individual land ownership documents. Only 8.8 per cent had property tax receipts.
Majority who would choose the beneficiary-led construction (BLC) or credit linked subsidy scheme (CLSS) verticals of PMAY met the cut-off date in Nagpur.
99 per cent of the surveyed households did not own a pucca house anywhere.
While the Aadhaar card is a document which almost all individuals possess, there is a variance in the possession of other required documents to access housing under PMAY.
Around three-fourth of the surveyed population are daily-wage workers with extremely low incomes (averaging less than INR 15,000 per month) thereby significantly reducing their access to formal lending institutions and any form of mortgage for loans. The total estimated budget for purchase of a new house for 60 percent of the respondents was below INR 7 lakh and 92 per cent of the respondents who demanded new housing could afford to pay less than INR 1.4 lakh as down payment with less than INR 5,000 as EMI.
Majority of the EWS participants who chose upgradation had houses larger than 300 sq feet. Among the respondents who demanded new housing, 87 per cent live in houses between 100–300 sq feet in size and majority aspired to own a 1BHK in a locality with basic infrastructure and facilities.