Who is the encroacher, really?

By some estimates, there is a shortage of more than 15 million dwelling units across urban India. People in our fast-growing cities and towns need places to live, but there aren’t enough buildings coming up to house them. This scarcity is not uniformly distributed across income groups. Instead, most of the shortage is in affordable homes. The working poor cannot even find places to rent, let alone buy a home with over two or three decades of savings.

Naturally, they are desperate. If you’ve got mouths to feed and not a lot of money, you’ll take whatever shelter you can find. And on cue, there are lots of not-so-scrupulous builders and property owners who know that if they put up a building illegally, there will be plenty of takers for it. This is now a flourishing industry, counting nearly 100 million people as customers.

Governments choose to ignore this because otherwise they would be forced to come up with better options. PG accommodations, for example, are supposed to adhere to occupancy norms designed to ensure the safety of residents. But many of those businesses would not be viable if they adhered to the norms, just as many schools, clinics, and other facilities would be forced to shut if they had to meet all the regulations. Necessity has become the mother of illegality.

Every once in a while, a fire or a building collapse will draw attention to this charade, but apart from pulling up the owner of that particular building, there is no effort to do anything different. Those who put up these structures accept the risks. They are betting that the State will not carry out large-scale demolitions and evictions. It’s a safe bet; why do buildings need a valid property ID if their occupants have voter IDs? Election logic is enough to keep everyone looking away from the problem.

The shortage that sustains the illegalities is by design. Master plans favour ownership rather than renting. They assume that people will be living in single-family homes with adequate space per person, natural light, breathable air, safe water, and so on. These assumptions steer most land towards high-end residential and commercial uses, reserving minimal amounts for lower-income groups. But ignoring the poor doesn’t make them disappear; it forces them to break laws to survive. By the wording of the law, millions of people are now ‘encroachers’, even though systemic failures in affordable housing supply have left them with no alternative.

From here, the problem compounds. Occasionally and unpredictably, governments will decide to act against one group of such encroachers, demolishing their homes and casting them out onto the street. Rather than acknowledge land use biases and shortages, the sarkar finds it simpler to blame the victims. The State that readily says “they should not be there” has not bothered to ask, and answer, where they should be instead.

Add to this the ongoing identity wars in our politics. By labelling a group of victims as outsiders, the focus is diverted from the failures of state governments. Language, religion, nationality, caste... There are many ways in which homeless people can be told that their fate is the result of their identity. Each time we dismiss one set of victims by pointing to their identity, our indifference to all of their fates rises.

There is an irony in this, or perhaps we should see it as an explanation. So many of the politicians run real estate businesses, but they cannot solve the shortage of buildings. So many of them run colleges, too, with similar shortcomings in that sector. Running a business in a particular industry has become a motivation to induce scarcity in it and then seek windfall profits from it. This is evidently a conflict of interest, but it goes on anyway.

There are solutions. Cities around the world have created numerous examples we could easily follow – reserving large tracts of land for rental housing, setting aside at least a third of the land to house the poor, and issuing building permits proportionately to serve each income group. None of this is rocket science; it’s a combination of common sense and compassion.

The real encroachers are those who have trespassed on the idea of human dignity, depriving so many Indians of a fair chance for a better life. The poor themselves lack the agency to tackle this imposition. It is up to us, the others whose homes seem to rise perpetually in value, to ask whether, in the very act of securing our assets and financial futures, we are also inextricably buying into the intolerable imposition that so many others face.

The writer is a Social technologist and entrepreneur, founder of Mapunity and co-founder, Lithium, wakes up with hope for the city and society, goes to bed with a sigh, repeats cycle.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.