Working Paper 412

There have been several institutional factors (e.g., ownership status of the land, multiple rounds of the survey without tangible outcomes, centre-state conflict over taking the credit of allotments, and the excuse of the Covid-19 pandemic) contributing to the overall delay in allotment and denying the rights of Delhi’s low- income residents to get possession of houses. [...] Here, our approach is two- pronged: on the one hand, we tried to understand the narratives of the officials on the housing supply ecosystem or the story of the unoccupied public housing stocks, and on the other, beneficiaries’ responses to this numeric approach by officials. [...] For a nuanced understanding of the complexity of the rehabilitation process and allotment of public housing, we study the detailed trajectories of events unfolding in the three basties in Delhi (Figure 4, 6, and 7). [...] Conclusions and Way Forward While many of the urban studies and housing economics literature have highlighted the role of access to serviced land, housing credit, and public subsidy in augmenting the supply of low- income affordable housing in Indian cities, they have largely overlooked the criticality of timely allotment and delivery of houses to intended beneficiaries. [...] Fourthly, it also shows that the increasing and decisive intervention of the judiciary in the due process has been phenomenal in ensuring the housing rights of many vulnerable basti residents, as plenty of instances reveal how the High Court has intervened in the ‘poor blind’ and exclusionary housing approach of the state in its efforts to make the city “slum-free”.