For Women In India, Fair Housing Hard to Find
BENGALURU, India — When Ruchita Chandrashekar decided to move to Bengaluru in November for a new job, she thought she had the perfect plan. She would find an apartment with a married friend whose husband was working in Paris and they would say they were sisters. They were both professionals in their 30s, with a sizable budget. Alas, they were still unattached to men.
Brokers asked if they could promise to never bring men over. To never drink. Several places they thought they had secured instead went to families.
“Sometimes, this is a nice life,” Ms. Chandrashekar said over lunch in Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore, where she works in organizational development for a tech company. “But then you meet all of these structures, like your landlords.”
Single working women, who number in the tens of millions, are making their case for greater freedom from India’s conservative norms.
Government figures from 2020 show that women enroll in higher education at higher rates than men. Yet just under 20 percent of Indian women engage in paid work, compared with 62 percent of women in China and 55 percent in the United States, according to World Bank figures. Many women work in informal jobs.
But if women were represented in the formal work force at the same rate as men, India’s economy could expand by an additional 60 percent by 2025, according to estimates.
With this in mind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked state labor ministers in August to come up with ideas for harnessing women’s economic potential. A good place to start, many say, would be the obstacles for women outside the office or factory.
Working women living independently in India’s cities face endless sermons from strangers. They pay more for a narrower selection of housing. Worried about sexual violence, friends track one another by phone until they reach their destinations.
In interviews with more than a dozen unmarried working women, safety emerged as the top concern in choosing jobs and housing. They did everything possible to shrink the distance from home to work. And they all had torments to share: being slapped on the rear by a man on a motorbike; fleeing a drunken taxi driver; running away from men howling for attention.
Many landlords see renting to single women alone or in groups (and single men, to a lesser extent) as a risk — to the stability of families, to the reputations of neighborhoods.
Among those who lease to women, higher rents, surveillance and paternalism are often the norm. Even if they rise at work, many women end up back in paying guest hostels, with curfews and bans on drinking, smoking and male guests. A renter’s religion, sexual orientation or caste can limit options further.
Nayla Khwaja, 28, who works in communications in Delhi, recalled a night when she was out late filming an event and the hostel where she was living would not let her back in. “It was just 10:30,” she said.
When women find a place that works, they stay. Meera Shankar, 59, rents rooms, with no curfew or visiting rules, in her Bengaluru apartment to women in finance and education who have stayed for years.
Farther south in Bengaluru, Ms. Chandrashekar eventually found a one-bedroom in a complex still under construction.
As she unpacked on a recent Sunday, her face brightened with anticipation. But her eyes darted toward the door as construction workers could be heard clomping up the outer stairs, men who would notice a woman living alone.
When the building quieted down again, she relaxed.
“I don’t know what this space, for me, looks like yet,” she said. “I’m excited.”