The State of Uni-Dimensional Houses and the Uni-Dimensional State of Housing: Lacunae in the Approach to Housing

Numerous families across India’s urban and rural landscape continue to live in conditions not fit for human habitation, even less making for conducive family environs. Large numbers of occupation-based migration to urban areas as well as lack of access to resources in rural areas mean that conditions of abject squalor characterise the large proportion of residential dwellings being built and inhabited across India. To scale the problem, in 2011, 377 million people (31 per cent of India’s population) lived in urban centres, of which as many as 65 million (or 27 per cent) lived in squatter or slum settlements. The Economic Survey of 2017 notes that on the one hand, migration to urban centres has been almost double of what the Census of 2011 had predicted, and on the other, districts in India that house the lowest 40 per cent of our population receive only about 29 per cent of governmental funding.