ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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India's Residential Rental Housing

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.

Politics of Development in Postcolonial India

While education in English has been advocated as a unifying and modernising force, it is also seen as a marker of imperialism and class privilege and a terrain of struggle among elite groups. Ruptures in such a class-divided educational system in turn shape specific debates over development, democracy and social change. Uneven empowerment that an education in English generates also has its fallout in an increasing polarisation, fracturing and violence against caste, gender and religious lines.

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