Addressing Slum Redevelopment Issues in India

The main objective of this study is to develop recommendations to improve the Government of India’s Housing for All policy. Apart from the recommendations to policymakers on institutional themes, we also provide recommendations to private sector real-estate developers for designing sustainable low-income settlements.

To help us achieve these objectives, we divided our study into three sections:

1. Literature Review of Past Policies in India:

In our study of global interventions to improve the quality of life for slum households we categorized past policy approaches into broad categories of slum upgradation or slum redevelopment. We compared the features of three past federal policies in India namely National Slum Development Program (NSDP), Basic Services for Urban Poor (BSUP), and Housing for All. Through our literature reviews and qualitative interviews, we found that in-situ slum redevelopment policies such as Housing for All present more advantages than past policies. In Section I, we present the analysis of three available policy options based on program features, performance, and achievements.

2. Stakeholder Meetings and Field Visits:

Since we found the in-situ component of the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) to be closest to the slum redevelopment component in Housing for All, we targeted this policy in our field research. In our stakeholder interviews we gauged its potential to become an effective model for slum redevelopment in emerging cities in India. During our visit to Mumbai in May 2015, we met with key stakeholders, including government officials, lawyers, real estate developers, policy makers, and private equity investors to understand implementation challenges of SRS. We also met with advisory agencies and academic experts in Ahmedabad and Delhi to understand scalability challenges for SRS. In Section II, we use these insights to analyze lessons from twenty years of implementing SRS that could be applicable for the Housing for All policy.

3. Recommendations:

In the final section, we synthesized our year-long research to distill four key recommendations to improve various types of sustainability of slum redevelopment. Our recommendations aim to use the field research from Mumbai to narrow down cities where in-situ redevelopment would be most administratively sustainable. We propose financing models for beneficiaries of these schemes which would ensure formalize property rights for the long term. We propose decentralized waste water and energy amenities to improve the environmental sustainability of housing and cities. Finally, we provide recommendations for architectural modifications which could retain the cultural sustainability of the communities. We aim to disseminate these four key recommendations to policy makers in India so that Housing for All is able to reach the goal of providing decent housing for every slum dweller by 2022.