Housing Shortages in Rural India

The right to adequate housing is recognised as a basic human right by the United Nations and its constituent bodies. Although India is a signatory to many international covenants in this regard, it has neither a rural housing policy nor mechanisms to monitor the realisation of the right to adequate housing. This paper examines the methodology used by the Working Group on Rural Housing for the Twelfth Five-Year Plan established by the Planning Commission of India to estimate the housing shortage in rural India. We argue that the methodology of the Working Group, which focussed only on the material used for roofs and walls, was inadequate and that their estimate of the housing shortage in rural India a severe underestimate. We use data from 15 village surveys to estimate the number of households that live in houses that are built of pucca material, have two rooms, an electricity connection, a source of water inside the house or immediately outside it, and a functioning latrine. (These criteria still fall well short of the quality of housing to the provision of which India is committed internationally.) In order to estimate the order of magnitude of the shortage of housing in rural India, we then apply the ratios from our village surveys to the total rural population. While the Working Group of the Planning Commission estimates the shortage of houses to be about 40 million housing units, our estimates of the shortfall in housing is of the order of 140 million units.