Hyderabad: There is some truth in the proverb “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, and no one knows this better than the UPA-2 government, which had a lot of good schemes but didn’t have a good monitoring mechanism. Now we have the new minister for urban development and urban poverty alleviation, M. Venkaiah Naidu, who wants to ensure housing for all by 2020 by reducing interest rates on home loans and also asking the state governments, LIC, banks, railways, etc., to provide housing for their employees.
While he is on this, he should first make it imperative for every construction company to mandatorily provide housing to the construction workers that they bring from far-off states. This is one industry that has added immensely to the homeless population in cities. Affordable housing has been much talked about and several companies have been putting up such housing, but the issue of how affordable is affordable housing differs with different economic layers of society.
Low interest rates on housing loans, which the banks and the RBI can consider, is just one component. The price of land, the largest cost component, has gone up tremendously. And private builders are sitting on vast amounts of land — what is euphemistically called “land banks”. The government will have to think of something as revolutionary as socialisation of land where government leases land for affordable housing to builders. You can’t sell land to the highest bidder and expect housing for the masses to come up. This is only a suggestion, but the minister can study how other countries have tackled this issue.
