The poor and low-income people are shunned by mainstream financial institutions

So, we get a plethora of “low-cost” home schemes with ambiguous rules for entitlement. The apathetic approach of successive governments is symptomatic of the disease that ails India’s housing system.There was a time when landlessness, which inevitably accompanies poverty and its attendant ills, affected a smaller chunk of the population. The housing units are usually attractive to members of the middle class, who often manoeuvre the eligibility rules and succeed in displacing the intended beneficiaries.The number of people facing housing custom sheet metal parts manufacturers insecurity is climbing more steeply as they struggle to make a choice between food on the table and a roof above their heads.

The poor and low-income people are shunned by mainstream financial institutions because they lack the requisite documents to attest their income. The ability to connect to all of these networks makes a habitat valuable. These are usually socially homogenous encampments where the unskilled poor live among themselves, disconnected from others, making it harder for them to access the mainstream economy. While we continue to record improvements in dealing with poverty, homelessness has been plagued with an unimaginative response from policy pundits.House prices have been stretching further and further away from normal wages, making it difficult for low-income families to get on the housing ladder. With no clear definition and a lot of fudging, anything is possible. However, the number of landless people has been rising.

Landlessness and the lack of secure property rights among the poor are among those inequities that perpetuate poverty, hold back economic development and fan social tensions. The ones without land join the ranks of the worst ones in extreme poverty and the task of poverty alleviation became even more difficult.One of the most challenging problems of our times is homelessness. It is thus critical to recognise housing investment as a fundamental building block of economic activity. Due to the high proportion of subsidy, only a few such units are built. Considering the links between landlessness and poverty or the need to score better successes against poverty, it is important to put a hard brake on the process of becoming landless. Faced with the enormity of the housing need and financial weakness of those in need, the government builds low-income housing units and distributes them at very high levels of subsidy.

Everyday, more and more families find themselves in a struggle to keep a decent roof over their heads. There are millions of low-income families who live in overcrowded, inadequate and unsafe spatchcock dwellings made with cheap and fragile material like rotting wood and plastic coverings, crammed between dusty paths and open sewers with virtually no sanitation, environmental risk factors and lack of even the barest infrastructure. Living in substandard housing leads to a vicious cycle of debilitating problems. A decent habitat and sheltered environment for low-income families can improve their well-being and catalyse overall economic growth.

A house is an object — a habitat is a node in an ecosystem of overlapping networks — physical (roads, water, power and sanitation), economic (labour markets, urban transport, distribution and retail, entertainment) and social (education, health, security, family and friends). There is little more critical to a family’s quality of life than a healthy and safe living space. Demographic shifts, combined with poor or non-existent land ownership policies and insufficient resources have resulted in a surge of slum creation and further deteriorated living conditions. .People actually do not demand houses — they demand habitats