LAW ON INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT Lecture Notes

Housing One of the Basic needs,
Security and comfort
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“Safe, affordable housing is a basic
necessity for every family. Without
a decent place to live, people
cannot be productive members of
society, children cannot learn and
families cannot thrive.”

 The term “shelter,” which is often used to
define housing, has a strong connection to
the ultimate purpose of housing throughout
the world. The mental image of a shelter is
of a safe, secure place that provides both
privacy and protection from the elements
and the temperature extremes of the outside
world. This vision of shelter, however, is
complex.

 Housing provides shelter. A good shelter is very necessary for
comfortable, tension free living. Imagine the situation when you
work the whole day but have no place to retire to at the need of
the day. Your life will become miserable.
 A house is not just four walls and a roof. It should be spacious,
airy and comfortable. A house provides protection from sunlight,
rain, heat, cold, etc. It provides stability to an individual. It helps
an individual to indulge in family life, social life.
 It promotes peace of mind and happiness of an individual which
leads to an increase in productivity. Quality of life in slums is
very low as compared to those people who are living in proper
houses. The physical ability to work of an individual is adversely
affected if he has no proper place to live in.
 Employers of today realize the importance of providing housing
facilities to their employees. The government has also realized
this and now-a-days government provides housing facilities to
many of its employees. Government has set up colonies for this
purpose. Even the private sector provides the facility of housing
to their employees. Many private industrial units provide housing
facilities for their employees.

 Proper housing also includes provision of basic
services like water, sanitation, drainage and
electricity. Further , the type and location of a house
is very important. It is very hard to live in a place
where there is no nearby market to buy the daily
needs or there is no proper bus service to go from one
place to another. Quality of housing has a direct
bearing on the efficiency of human resource.
 For a majority of households housing has been
primarily a self help activity. But increasing
population pressure has made it difficult for the
poorer segments of the population to acquire proper
housing facilities. It has made it necessary for the
state to launch housing schemes for weaker sections
of the population.
 In India the formulation and implementation of the
housing programme is the responsibility of the state
governments. The central government however
supplements the efforts of the state governments.

History
 Housing policies of the Government of India
have come a long way since the 1950s. While at
the start of “planned development” the policies
were more welfare centric, later on these came
to be driven by a well-defined constellation of
economic interests.
 At the same time, the role of the government
has also changed gradually from being a provider
of housing to being merely a facilitator of
housing activity. For an easier understanding it
divides the period since 1950s into four phases.

 The first phase roughly comprises of the first two decades,
when the initial policies were taking shape and the
government was trying to address the problems of all
sections of society .
• The second phase is roughly the period from the early 1970s
to mid 1980s; in this period, the government accepted that
it cannot serve all the sections of society and hence started
focusing only on weaker sections (WS) .
• The third phase is roughly the period from the mid 1980s to
early 2000s. In this period, neoliberal policies made their
way into the discourse and its focus changed from physical
provision of housing to its financing.
• The last phase refers to the last 10-12 years. In this period,
the government has definitively adopted the role of
facilitator. It is now promoting the participation of private
sector in housing activities for all the sections of society ,
while itself taking a backseat in all these activities.

 After its Independence, The Government of India was facing a
huge housing challenge, especially in urban areas, due to large
scale migration after the partition of country. So in these early
years, the government took the responsibility for provision of
housing, declaring that private sector had not been able to
provide it sufficiently. This resulted in the central government
bringing out various schemes for different sections of society in
its early years.
 While constitutionally it was not clear which (centre or state)
government should take this responsibility, the Central
government resolved to take a lead in Urban sector housing,
and brought out schemes like Subsidized Housing Scheme for
Industrial Workers (1952), Low Income Group Housing Scheme
(1954), Middle Income Group Housing Scheme (1959) and Slum
Clearance and Improvement Scheme (1956) etc. State
Governments were asked to take up the responsibility of
housing in rural areas.

 These were the early days for Indian Government at
the helm of power and hence, a lot of churning was
going on within the government on various policy
related. Sometimes, this churning resulted in sharp
turns in government’s policies in these early years.
 In the housing sector, a sharp turn was visible in the
central government’s policies on slums; while the First
Plan called slums a ‘national problem’ and advocated
its complete clearance from all the cities, the
government soon realised that it neither had the
monetary capacity, nor the institutional capacity to
achieve these goals.
 Hence, the Second Plan immediately mellowed down
on slum related issue and asked for the measures to
be taken for improvement of the slums wherever it was
feasible in addition to required clearances.

 The early Plans also emphasised on building an institutional
capacity to control the country’s urban growth and deliver decent
housing to public. Hence, the government advocated the creation
of various institutions, both at centre and state levels.
 While National Building Organisation was created in 1954 to
facilitate research in building construction activity, Town and
Country Planning Organisation came into existence in 1962 to
facilitate spatial planning activities across the country. At the state
level, various Housing Boards were created during the same
period. The main objective of these housing boards was to take up
housing activities for all the sections of society with a special focus
on Lower Income Groups (LIG) .
 During this period, the government was of the view that the
prevalent proliferation of slums with haphazard urban growth in
Indian cities can be controlled through the proper implementation
of a Master Plan with a set of Development Control Rules.
 Hence, it vigorously pushed for creation of Master Plans for all the
cities. It asked state governments to create special agencies to
take up these activities, which would also be involved in controlling
and developing the land in its boundaries. For this purpose, Delhi
Development Authority (DDA) was created in national capital in
1957, which later on became a model for creation of other
development authorities across many cities.

 After various experiments in the first phase, the
government finally realised in the second phase
that it cannot provide housing to all, as it
envisaged earlier.
 This realisation was quite visible in the drop of
number of housing related schemes floated by the
government for the sections other than poor or
socially backward.
 During this period, government housing schemes
were especially focused on lower sections of the
society. Other sections were encouraged to take
up housing activities as self-provisioning activity
with limited support from the government.

 By this time, the government had also realised that slum
clearance was not going to solve the problem of housing in
the city; the Fourth Plan went to the extent of saying that
“slum clearance often lead to creation of new slums”. Hence
the government started focussing on low cost schemes like
Environmental Improvement Scheme of Urban Slums
(1972) and Sites and Services Scheme (1980) to tackle the
problem of slum proliferation.
 This period was also the first time when the government
noted the economic significance of housing activities and its
contribution to the country’s economy. Hence, with a vision
of “controlled and well-directed growth” of the housing
sector , the government created a national level Housing
and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) in 1970. At
its inception, HUDCO was envisaged as an institution which
will work as the government’s nodal agency in promoting
“sustainable habitat development to enhance the quality of
life”.

 It was during this phase that neoliberal policies had started
making their ways into India. The government was in the
process of liberalizing the economy, which was also visible
in its housing policies. Its housing policies had started
talking about restricting government’s role as a provider of
housing in the country and pushed it to take up the role of a
facilitator in this sector. The Seventh Plan advised the
government that “ Government’s role in the field of urban
housing has per force to be promotional.
 The major effort will have to come from the private sector,
Government’s role will have to be restricted to the
improvement of slums, direct provision of housing to the
weaker sections of the society and encouragement and
support of housing finance institutions…” Even the
responsibilities of slum improvement and weaker section
housing were being tried to be pushed towards lower tiers of
governments.

 Quite dramatically, the Ninth Plan had declared that “Housing is
State [Government’s] subject” (point 3.7.106, Ninth Five Year
Plan). It was a controversial statement because as explained
above, the Constitution of India does not mention housing under
any of the three lists, listed in its seventh schedule. Yet, it has been
internalised and repeated (most of the times clubbed with land,
urban development and infrastructure) in many government
documents over the years without any proper explanation.
Simultaneously, a push for decentralisation, through the 74 th
Constitutional amendment, made Urban Local Bodies responsible
for providing services in their jurisdictions, which also included
housing.
 This downward push of responsibilities resulted in the emergence
of a particular kind of housing schemes for poorer section, which
were designed by the centre but required matching funds from
state and local level governments and were supposed to be
implemented by ULBs (these are better known as Centrally
Sponsored Schemes). Some examples of such schemes are
Urban Basic Services Scheme (1986, later renamed as Urban
Basic Services for Poor in 1991), Nehru Rozgar Yojna’s Scheme of
Housing and Shelter Upgradation (1990) and National Slum
Development Programme (1996). It is important here to note that
previous housing schemes were also designed by the centre, but
those never came with the clause of matching fund requirements
from State or Local governments, which made a lot of difference in
the implementation of schemes.

 In this period, the Central Government’s focus shifted to facilitating
the financing activities for housing rather than providing it
physically on ground, as was the norm before. The Seventh Plan
admitted that “The most crucial need for housing development…
[is to establish] a proper and diversified institutional structure for
housing finance…” To serve this purpose, the National Housing
Bank (NHB) was created in 1987.
 Parallel to the creation of NHB, commercial banks and other
Housing Finance Institutions were directed by the government to
participate on a larger scale in housing finance activities. It
resulted in easy availability of housing finances for private sector
with cheap interest rates. Private builders took advantage of this
opportunity and started taking up housing activities in an
unprecedented manner.
 At the same time, government-sponsored housing agencies like
HUDCO and various other state-level housing boards were pushed
to compete with private players for funds from the open market,
without any shield of government’s support. These agencies were
mostly serving the poorer sections of society, which had a limited
repayment capacity and hence were not able to compete with
private developers. As a result, these agencies started losing their
ground in housing market, very rapidly.

 HUDCO was one agency, which bore most of the brunt of
these policies. The government withdrew its income tax
exemption in 1991-92 and then slowly cut off its equity
support too. It was also suggested that HUDCO should
strengthen its infrastructure wing to focus on land and
infrastructure development to maintain its credit rating.
 All these pressures from different quarters ultimately resulted
in a shift in HUDCO’s focus from providing housing to
weaker sections of society to funding large scale
infrastructure projects, which promised good returns and
hence good ratings.
 In the same period, to facilitate private sector investment in
housing, the government also tried to either amend or repeal
few laws which it called archaic. As a result Urban Land
Ceiling and Regulation Act and Rent Control Acts were
repealed in most of the cities. Even the Development Control
Rules were changed and experimented with in many cities. It
allowed builders to construct buildings with higher Floor
Space Indexes (FSIs) with no physical infrastructure on
ground to support the resulted densities.

 Phase IV is, by and large, a continuation of the neoliberal
tendencies of Phase III, but on a larger scale. By now, the
government had comfortably placed itself in the role of
facilitator of housing activities. Finally, it also declared that it
does not have the kind of monetary capacities to fund the
urban development and housing activities in the country as
much a s required. Hence it started looking for ways to
attract private sector investment in this sector.
 The central government’s schemes in this phase, which
were focused only on weaker sections of society (Valmiki
Ambedkar Awas Yojna in 2001, which was later merged with
BSUP under JnNURM in 2005 and then in Rajiv Awas Yojna
in 2013) are advocated to be implemented on Public Private
Partnership (PPP) basis. With a focus on facilitating private
investment in this sector, Government has allowed 100%
FDI in housing sector and the latest budget (2014-15) has
gone one step further in this direction by listing slum
redevelopment as a CSR activity to attract more private
funds.

 During this period, government has also retracted
from its master-plan-led development route, which
was promoted vigorously in the first few plans,
and has started openly criticising it. According to
the Eleventh Plan,
 “The Master Plan concept has also not been
useful in addressing India’s large and widely
spread slums. By locking-in the supply of
buildable land and space, the Master Plan, inter
alia, inhibits the development of housing markets
and contributes to the proliferation of slums.”
 This led the government to try a different route of
development planning led by City Development
Plans (CDPs) in its latest scheme called
Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission
(JnNURM). However, this route also seems to
have failed in producing desired results and
hence was severely criticised in the Twelfth Plan.

LAW ON INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT Lecture Notes

 National Housing Policy (NHP) In view of
various problems faced in relation to housing
in independent India, it became necessary
for the government to come out with a
comprehensive national policy that clearly
spelt out priorities for promoting a sustained
development of housing.
 The National Housing Policy emphasised in its
preamble that housing is not only a
commodity but also a productive investment

• To assist all people, and in particular the houseless, the inadequately
housed and the vulnerable sections and to secure for themselves
affordable shelter through access to developed land, building materials,
finance and technology;
• To create an enabling environment for housing activity by various sections
by eliminating constraints, and by developing an efficient and equitable
system for the delivery of housing inputs;
• To expand the provision of infrastructure facilities in rural and urban areas
in order to improve the environment of human settlements, increase the
access of poorer households to basic services, and to increase the supply
of developed land for housing;
• To undertake, within the overall context of policies for poverty alleviation
and employment, steps for improving the housing situation of the poorest
sections and vulnerable groups by direct initiative and financial support
of the State.
• To promote a more equal distribution of land and houses in urban and rural
areas, and to curb speculation in land and housing in consonance with
macroeconomic policies for efficient and equitable growth

(1)To motivate and help all people and in
particular the houseless and the inadequately
housed, to secure for themselves affordable
shelter through access to land, materials,
technology and finance.
(2)To improve the environment of human
settlements with a view to raise the quality of
life through the provision of drinking water,
sanitation and other basic services.
(3)The policy envisages priority for promoting
access to shelter for the houseless and
disadvantaged groups such as Scheduled Castes

 To facilitate constructio n of 20 lakh dwelling
units each year with more emphasis on the
poor. Out of 20 lakh additional houses, 7 lakh
houses would be constructed in urban areas
while remaining 13 lakh in rural areas.
• HUDCO is expected to meet more than 55
percent of the target i.e. 4 lakh units and
balance 3 lakh units per year will be met by
other housing financial institutions
recognized by the National Housing Bank,
Corporate Sector and Co-operatives.

 National Urban Housing & Habitat Policy (NUHHP),
2007:
The National Urban Housing & Habitat Policy 2007
(NUHHP-2007) has been formulated keeping in view
the changing socio-economic parameters of the urban
areas and growing requirement of shelter and related
infrastructure. The Policy seeks to promote various
types of public-private partnerships for realizing the
goal of “Affordable Housing for All” with special
emphasis on the urban poor. Given the magnitude of
the housing shortage and budgetary constraints of
both the Central and State Governments, the NUHHP-
2007 focuses the spotlight on multiple stake-holders
namely, the Private Sector, the Cooperative Sector,
the Industrial Sector for labour housing and the
Services/ Institutional Sector for employee housing

The National Housing and Habitat Policy
(NUHHP), 2007,with a mandate of providing
“Affordable Housing to All”, envisaged that the
States would prepare a State Urban Housing and
Habitat Policy and also a State Urban Housing &
Habitat Action Plan. The policy empowers the
States to include passing of specific Acts by the
States to achieve the housing policy objectives
through institutional, legal & regulatory reforms,
fiscal concessions, financial sector reforms and
innovations in the area of resource mobilization
for housing and related infrastructure
development including promotion of cost
effective building materials and technologies at
the State level.

Urban housing shortage in India, estimated to be 18.78
million during the 12th Plan period with consequent
increases resulting in increase in urbanization in future
years, is an area of concern. Historically housing
policy/programmatic interventions have been oriented
towards home ownership, nevertheless, providing housing
to all on ownership basis has proved challenging. Growing
family needs had resulted in overcrowding and slum like
situations due to lack of alternatives such as rental housing
and absence of rental housing frameworks in the Country.
In order to address these issues, the Ministry of Housing
and Urban Poverty Alleviation has come up with the Draft
National Urban Rental Housing Policy (NURHP), 2015. The
vision of the Draft Policy is ‘to create a vibrant,
sustainable and inclusive rental housing market in India’

 The RAY programme aims at creating a slum free
India. It was launched in 2011 in two phases. The
“preparatory phase” ended in 2013. The
“implementation phase” was sanctioned for action
from 2013 to 2022.
 The two major objectives of RAY can be summed up
as follows:
• Legal recognition of slums and bringing them into
the formal system.
• Redress the failures of the formal system The RAY
comprises of a series of guidelines that govern the
many aspects of the program, right from the policy
measures to be taken to the way in which these
measures must be implemented. For our study, we
shall focus only on the policy measures proposed by
this scheme.

The policies which have been envisaged by the
governments
over the years have been some modification of
“Housing For All 2022” (HFA) policy (MoHUPA,
2015 that has currently been introduced. The HFA
policy envisages providing, according to the
President’s Speech, “every family with a pucca
house with water connection, toilet facilities,
24x7 electricity supply and access”.

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana–
Gramin targets for 2017 has
been revised by the central
government after the
announcement made by PM
Narendra Modi in his 31st
December Speech. The
government has increased the
overall number of housing units
to be constructed by 1 Crore
under the PMAY-G.

 The Mission is being implemented
during 2015-2022 and provides central
assistance to Urban Local Bodies
(ULBs) and other implementing
agencies through States/UTs for:
• In-situ Rehabilitation of existing slum
dwellers using land as a resource
• Credit Linked Subsidy
• Affordable Housing in Partnership
• Subsidy for beneficiary-led individual
houses construction/enhancement.

 Benefits to eligible candidates are being
provided through 4 different components of
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana as following:
1. In-situ Slum Redevelopment (ISSR) Scheme
2. Credit Linked Subsidy (CLSS) Scheme
3. Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP)
Scheme
4. Beneficiary-led Individual House
Construction
(BLCs) Scheme

The core belief of NRLM is that the poor
have innate capabilities and a strong desire
to come out of poverty. This intrinsic
capability of the poor is unleashed only when
they are organized into institutions which are
truly owned by them, provided sufficient
capacity building and handholding support. A
sensitive support structure from national
level to subdistrict level is required to induce
such a social mobilization process

“To reduce poverty through building strong
grassroots institutions of the poor. These
institutions enable the poor households to
access gainful self-employment and skilled
wage employment opportunities, resulting in
appreciable increase in their incomes, on a
sustainable basis”.

 Poor have a strong desire to come out of
poverty, and, have innate capabilities
 Social mobilization and building strong
institutions of the poor is critical for
unleashing their capabilities
 An external dedicated and sensitive support
structure is required to induce social
mobilization

The core values which will guide all the
activities under NRLM are as follows:
• Inclusion of the Poorest
• Transparency
• Accountability
• Equity – to the disadvantaged, esp. women
and vulnerable groups
• Partnerships; and
• Ownership and key role of the poor in all
stages – planning, implementation, and,
monitoring

The implementation of NRLM in a Mission
mode is essential as it will enable (a) focus
on targets, outcomes and time bound
delivery (b) shift from the present allocation
based strategy to a demand driven strategy
enabling the states to formulate their own
poverty reduction action plans, and (c)
monitoring against targets of poverty
outcomes.

 Sensitive Support Structure of National Rural
Livelihood Mission:
The major drawback in SGSY was lack of
dedicated manpower for the process intensive
work envisaged under the programme. All
evaluation studies have pointed out this as
critical shortcoming. Hence, the major
innovation under NRLM is the setting up of
sensitive and dedicated support structures at the
National, State, district and sub-district levels.
The district level units for managing the
activities of NRLM will have suitable linkages
with District Rural Development Agencies
(DRDAs)

 This will ensure that at least one member
from each rural poor household, preferably a
woman, is brought under the Self Help Group
(SHG) network in a time bound manner.
Efforts will be made to strengthen and
consolidate all existing SHGs of poor
households formed by various organizations.

 These institutions will partner with
Government, Public and Private sectors for
last mile delivery of social and economic
services for the poor. NRLM will in addition
promote specialized institutions like
Livelihoods collectives, producers
cooperatives/companies for deriving
economies of scale, backward and forward
linkages, and access to information, credit,
technology, markets etc. The Livelihoods
collectives will enable the poor to optimize
their limited resources.

 Ta king its efforts to achieve ‘Housing
for All by 2022 further, the central
government has announced a new
public-private partnership (PPP) policy
for affordable housing that allows
extending central assistance of up to
Rs.2.50lakh per each house to be built
by private builders even on private
lands. Under this policy announced by
Minister of Housing & Urban Affairs
Hardeep Singh Puri, eight PPP (Public
Private Partnership) models have been
provided for private sector to invest .

 Enhancing Access to Low Cost Land.
• Reducing Costs through Efficiency Gains in
Construction and Operations.
• Access to Financing and Capital Markets.
• Private Land for affordable housing in
exchange for permission for more intensive
utilization of land.

 The National Housing Policy has been announced
at the National level as a whole. Considering the
above, State Governments are also trying to
develop their own housing policies.
 In view of that, the Government of Assam wholly
endorses the need of a National Housing Policy
and also formulated Housing Policy at the State
level.
 Assam is one of the states which formulated
State Housing Policy in Sept. 1988, and the same
was finally approved in 1993 as Assam State
Housing Policy. The same is now being applied in
Assam.

 Apun Ghar is a new home loan
scheme for Assam Government
employees under which home
loans will be provided to the state
govt employees at subsidized
interest rates. The Assam
government has signed with the
state bank of India to provide
home loans at hugely subsidized
interest rates to its employees.

 Under the Apun Ghar scheme, the state government
would provide housing loans at a subsidized rate of 5%
for its women employees and 5.5% for men employees.
The loan would be provided without and collateral
security and processing fee.
 The main objective of Apun Ghar housing loan scheme
is to provide housing to all state residents. Though,
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana is also running in all the
towns and cities of the state under which loans at
subsidized rates are provided.
 Under the Apun Ghar scheme, the state government
employees can avail a loan of up to Rs 15 Lakh for with
an interest subsidy of 3.5%. The subsidy on interest
rates would benefit state government employees in
terms of lower interest rates and lower EMI’s.

 Main goals to be achieved in next 10 (ten) years would
be to
(i) construct more houses for the poor, so that a dent is made
in regard to housing shortages;
(ii) supply of developed land, finance to E.W.S. and L.I.G.;
(iii) develop low-cost building materials and cost-effective
construction technologies;
(iv) upgrade rural and urban unserviceable house;
(v) construct house for S.C. and S.T.;
(vi) provide minimum level of basic services and amenities
for
healthy environment through integrated development of
rural and urban settlement.

 Several schemes have been started by the
government to solve the problem of rural housing.
Under the Minimum needs Programme house sites are
allotted and construction assistance provided to
rural landless workers, artisans and weaker sections.
This scheme was initiated in 1971.
 The Indira Awas Yojna (IAY) was introduced in 1985-86
for the poorest of the poor belonging to scheduled
castes and Scheduled tribes and freed bonded
labourers in the rural areas. Houses under this
scheme are built in clusters so that common facilities
can be provided for the clusters.
 Housing and Urban Development Corporation
(HUDCO) has been financing several rural housing
schemes by allocating 15% of its resources to such
schemes.

 Housing schemes started by the government in the urban areas as
follows:
 1) Social housing schemes for different income groups operated
by the states and City level agencies with the budgetary support
and loans from HUDCO,LIC and other financial agencies.
 2) As part of the Nehru Rozgar Yojana(NRY), Housing and Shelter
up gradation scheme for the urban poor was introduced in 1989
in cities with population between 1 and 20 lakhs.
 3) A scheme for Footpath Dwellers Night Shelter was introduced
in 1988-89 to provide shelters. Later sanitation facility was
extended to the pavement dwellers in the cites.
 4) Co-operative group housing societies have been formed for
different income groups with help of loans from LIC,HUDCO and
Commercial Banks.
 5)Various other schemes including ownership housing scheme for
central government employees , working women scheme,
environmental improvement of urban slums and house
improvement scheme, rental housing scheme for employees of
public sector undertakings are operated by various state
governments.

 In spite of all these efforts housing problem still
remain very serious because of:
1) Increasing population :
The population of the country is increasing at a very
fast rate which causes the increase in demand for
housing.
2) Urbanisation :
The movement of people from rural to urban areas
leads to increase in demand for houses in urban
areas.
3) Resource Constraints :
The available resources with the government are
not sufficient to meet the requirement of housing
for the entire population and hence the increase in
the number of slums.

 Urbanisation and housing reveal a nation’s
economic growth and social wellbeing. India’s
urban population is growing at an average 2.1%
every year since 2015. It is likely to reach 60
crore by 2031 (up from 37.7 crore today).
 But the growth in housing has been unable to
keep pace. Currently, the housing shortage in
India is close to 1.9 crore units. The
economically weaker sections (EWSs) and lower
income groups (LIGs) account for 96% of the
urban shortage.
 The Government of India has recognised the
need to fill the gap in both urban an rural
housing. Large-scale housing policies that are
affordable are sure to help.

LAW ON INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT Lecture Notes

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