Rental housing for the urban poor and migrant communities is an effort to address their housing vulnerabilities, which were highlighted in the COVID-19 pandemic induced reverse migration. GOI’s Pradhan Mantri AWAS Yojana (Prime Minister’s Housing Mission) -Urban aims to bridge the housing gap by delivering affordable rental houses to the urban poor. Previous efforts at facilitating delivery of rental housing include the draft National Urban Rental Housing Policy and Draft Model Tenancy Act – frameworks to scale-up rental housing delivery and its efficient and transparent regulation. States of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra have further enacted laws that formalise the rental markets, address bottlenecks and create more inclusive rental housing markets. The Policy Lab Series titled “Addressing Housing Vulnerabilities for Migrants” comprises four webinars and is curated by Cities Alliance, the Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI) initiative at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), the World Bank, GIZ India, Habitat for Humanity, Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO), and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The labs are envisioned to act as a platform to deepen the rental housing policy dialogue; restructure, influence and operationalise the policy, legislation and regulation at the national and state levels. Besides, the Labs intend to examine the market mechanisms and enabling ecosystems needed to facilitate public agencies, private sector and household-level delivery of rental housing both in formal and informal mode.
The first Policy Lab of the Series will be on “Policy and Legal Framework for Enabling Rental Housing” and is scheduled to be held on September 16, 2020 at 16:30 IST. This Policy Lab aims to discuss the viability of the policy and legal interventions thus far, and their impact on the functioning of rental housing markets in India for the urban poor. It will open up the space for leveraging learnings from international experiences for critically examining the policy, legal and regulatory instruments which can be devised and/or revised to establish an enabling environment for formal private rental housing suppliers. It shall also examine supply side factors such as access to land (security, tradability and enforceability of land tenure), infrastructure and services provision, planning and building regulations, building materials industry, access to finance; and various demand side factors of tenants.
A concept note and agenda for the first Policy Lab can be accessed here.
