Nearly three decades after the first National Housing Policy in 1988, there has been a belated acknowledgment of the policy blindness towards those who cannot afford to buy a house regardless of the subsidies and tax concessions offered. It has come in the form of the draft National Urban Rental Housing Policy 2017, currently awaiting the Union Cabinet’s approval.

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The Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, which has framed the policy, defines its own role as that of a ‘facilitator’ or ‘enabler’. It will merely extend fiscal and non-fiscal concessions for rental housing created by the state or through PPP and under corporate social responsibility.

It classifies rental housing into two broad categories: Social rental housing for urban poor and market-driven rental housing. Social rental housing is targeted at the economically weaker sections, low-income groups as well as the section defined as ‘tenants by constraint’ which includes the urban poor belonging to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other backward classes, migrants, transgenders and senior citizen.

The market-driven rental housing includes institutional rental units such as hostels for students and working men and women, public rental housing for the 17.5 million employed by public sector undertakings (PSUs) and government departments and private rental housing for everyone else.

The policy explicitly refuses to address the issue of homelessness. “This is because the government still continues to treat homelessness as livelihood issue which is why schemes for construction of shelters come under the National Urban Livelihood Mission instead of putting it under housing (ownership or rental) policies,” said Mukta Naik, urban planner and a senior policy researcher at the Centre for Policy Research.

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