SHIVANI SINGH

Last week, Delhi moved a step ahead in enforcing the landpooling policy by notifying 89 rural villages as urban. The residents here will now be able to pool their farmlands and partner with private developers to build and sell homes.

This could be good news for those looking for a legitimate residential address in Delhi. Despite rising incomes, many city dwellers have already been priced out of Delhi into the National Capital Region. Many others have settled for “cheaper” illegal homes in the city’s unauthorised colonies. Clearly, Delhi Development Authority, the primary landowner and developer of the city, failed in its basic duty of providing affordable housing.

The agency’s policy of locking up huge tracts of land and not developing them held up the housing supply. A study by senior DDA official K Srirangan in 1997 found that this forced buyers to shift to the illegal market where they could pick plots in different sizes, at cheaper rates, in desired time and on flexible payment and construction terms.

To make matters worse, from 2001 onwards, the DDA stopped building big projects despite a boom in the property market. According to a 2014 working paper by Jatinder S. Bedi for the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), local builders, who didn’t have the sanction to acquire and develop large plots like their counterparts in the NCR, converted single or double storey houses into multi-storey buildings.

This again helped property dealers more than the final users. While the share of selfowned households increased from 67.4% in 2001 to 69.2% in 2011, property prices increased more than 10 times in a span of fewer than 10 years, the study found.