The impact of public housing interventions on a local context

Abstract

Housing provisions by public agencies for low-income people present a dismal picture in most developing countries. The reasons are typically scarce resources and adoption of high standards, which result in a limited supply of complete dwelling units, inappropriate in their use of resources and, at the same time, not responsive to the occupants' needs and priorities. This study puts forward that, in the context of India, public interventions (which include governmental and other agencies) have not only had limited success in providing housing, but have tended to neglect the impacts the housing programs and projects have on a local area. The study examines the policies and programs at both the overall and local level, using case-studies to illustrate different types of public interventions generally in India, and specifically within East Calcutta. The study is outlined in four parts. The first part deals with describing the overall situation of housing policies in India and development policies of East Calcutta. The second part looks at the local context in detail, documenting its characteristics, and describing through three case-studies the impact of these interventions on the settlements. It illustrates the major impacts that public interventions have had on settlement formation, user- involvement in dwelling provision and security of tenure . The third part elaborates the reasons for wanting to know about the impacts and a process for documenting them. The emphasis is on understanding hard-to- measure qualitative impacts rather than quantifiable ones. The last part summarizes the range of issues and impacts and presents the findings about the hypotheses that were put forward initially. The study concludes that public interventions can play an important role in housing processes if they are designed to make use of the local context as an active input in areas of policy planning and project implementation.