The focus of my work is affordable housing for migrant workers in India. The Indian government recently announced an Affordable Rental Housing Complexes scheme and I am creating a housing finance model that projects revenues and costs for affordable rental housing.
The article “Job loss, rent and exodus —-Covid-19 crisis tells us migrants need housing security” in The Print provides important context on the state of affordable housing in India and the relationship between affordable housing and coronavirus. During 2001-2011, approximately 14 million people in India moved to cities in search of work. At least ⅓ of the urban migrants rent their housing because rental housing allows them to move and avoid locking a large portion of their financial resources in real estate. 70% of houses in India are rented without contractual agreement because the cost of legally obtaining a home is high. People in rental housing are more at-risk for coronavirus because they often have inadequate services for water and sanitation and share these services with other people.
While I have learned about the local context of affordable housing through a book on Saath’s work in Ahmedabad, it was valuable for me to learn about the national context through this article. This article provided great information on the state of affordable housing in India through statistics and descriptions of overall trends. However, I wish that there were more perspectives from migrant workers and the nonprofits that work with migrant workers. I would have appreciated reading about specific examples of how the housing situation affects migrant workers in addition to the description of overall trends.