The first is housing policy. By this we mean that we are concerned with particular forms of public action, the specific instruments used in order to carry them out, and the actors and institutions tasked with doing so. Such a focus does not imply that we believe that policy actions more powerfully control or direct housing as opposed to, for example, the market or self-built housing by communities. It implies only that our focus is on how and to what ends policy makers and public institutions must act precisely given that they are just one part of the various dynamics influencing urban housing. Our focus is on urban areas in which we include peri-urban growth. We look at policy across scale of action – local, city, regional, state and central – as well as domains of practice.

We consider a range of approaches and interventions from regulations to incentives, rights and entitlement frameworks to missions, projects and plans. We consciously remain quite closely tethered to current frameworks of urban policy in India – actually existing practices, policies and paradigms. This limits our room for maneuver. While it implies that many of our suggested policy responses and interventions are feasible without radical changes to the existing policy and political landscape, it also means that we are unable to propose certain systemic and far-reaching changes as powerfully as we’d like. We have attempted to balance the need for pragmatic and immediate action with slow, medium- to long-term structural change as far as possible throughout. In this paper, however, we have chosen to emphasize the former. This is a paper then that takes seriously the imperative to act amidst uncertainly and imperfect policy paradigms.