Affordable housing development in India: a real deal for low-income people?

Affordable housing has been the latest addition in the lexicon of Indian policy circles. As neoliberalism started gathering political and policy momentum, the discourse around low-income housing has shifted towards the Government of India's agenda of 'affordable housing for all'. A stated goal of the policy is to increase housing supply, including the low-income category. Today, however, the manifesting goals of affordable housing design seem to be a 'walk in two worlds', with inherent contradictions and paradoxes in the housing 'dream' currently being repackaged as affordable homes for low-income people. This paper investigates this aphorism. It argues that both affordability and housing design have several different meanings and identities. Transplanting standard housing design across the board suggests a rather elementary confluence of priorities and policies that is capable of producing a range of alternative scenarios, which may not necessarily align with the goal of 'affordable housing for all'.