Rental housing is an integral part of the housing tenure systems in cities, and is also integral to the stages of a migrant's upward mobility from squatter settlement to ownership housing. An examination of the residential rental housing situation in India during the last decades using data from the Census of India and the National Sample Surveys finds that more than one-tenth of the households in India lived in rented houses in 2011, of which almost four-fifths of the total households living in rented houses in India were in the urban sector. Moreover, while the issues of shelter deprivation of many households and the question of affordability of shelter remain, a new phenomenon of a sharp rise in the number of vacant houses during the last decade has added to the severity of the housing problem. It establishes the manifestation of rising inequality between those in need of housing and those in abundance.
