Ismail Haque, PhD

Low-income households and migrant households in Indian cities are largely dependent on the informal private rental market to satisfy their housing needs, even though such housing in most cases is of poor quality with little security of tenure. The Government of India’s Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHCs) scheme is an attempt to provide a formal housing solution for low-income households through the route of institutional rental housing. So far, the scheme has had a muted supply side response. This policy series re-visits four institutional multi-family rental schemes located in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chandigarh and Kota to understand the challenges and issues involved with such projects. Insights on financial viability, rental management, beneficiary selection and livability issues affecting these four projects offer important lessons for the ARHCs scheme. The ARHCs scheme have been off to a slow start; for it to gain traction in the future, the sanctioned projects need to be developed and implemented well. This policy series paper may help identify timely, robust and informed policy actions to revitalize the rental sector by providing a roadmap to ensure sustainable outcomes.

In this study, we trace the COVID-19 pandemic's footprint across India's districts. We identify its primary epicentres and the outbreak's imprint in India's hinterlands in four separate time-steps, signifying the different lockdown stages. We also identify hotspots and predict areas where the pandemic may spread next. Significant clusters in the country's western and northern parts pose risk, along with the threat of rising numbers in the east. We also perform epidemiological and socioeconomic susceptibility and vulnerability analyses, identifying resident populations that may be physiologically weaker, leading to a high incidence of cases and pinpoint regions that may report high fatalities due to ambient poor demographic and health-related factors. Districts with a high share of urban population and high population density face elevated COVID-19 risks. Aspirational districts have a higher magnitude of transmission and fatality. Discerning such locations can allow targeted resource allocation to combat the pandemic's next phase in India.

India has gradually progressed into fertility transition over the last few decades. However, the timing and pace of this transition has varied notably in terms of both its geography and the demographic groups most affected by it. While much literature exists on the relationships between fertility level and its influence on demographic, economic, socio-cultural and policy-related factors, the potential spatial variations in the effects of these factors on the fertility level remain unaddressed. Using the most recent district-level census data (of 2011) for India, this nationwide study has identified plausible spatial dependencies and heterogeneities in the relationships between the district-wise Total Fertility Rates (TFRs) and their respective demographic, socioeconomic and cultural factors. After developing a geocoded database for 621 districts of India, spatial regression and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models were used to decipher location-based relationships between the district-level TFR and its driving forces. The results revealed that the relationships between the district-level TFR and the considered selected predictors (percentage of Muslims, urbanization, caste group, female mean age at marriage, female education, females in the labour force, net migration, sex ratio at birth and exposure to mass media) were not spatially invariant in terms of their respective strength, magnitude and direction, and furthermore, these relationships were conspicuously place-and context-specific. This study suggests that such locality-based variations and their complexities cannot be explained simply by a single narrative of either socioeconomic advancement or government policy interventions. It therefore contributes to the ongoing debate on fertility research in India by highlighting the spatial dependence and heterogeneity of the impacts made by demographic, socioeconomic and cultural factors on local fertility levels. From a methodological perspective, the study also discerns that the GWR local model performs better, in terms of both model performance and prediction accuracy, compared with the conventional global model estimates.

Have changing social and spatial dynamics weakened
India’s rigid caste structures in urban areas? This study of
the magnitude of spatial segregation in the 10 largest
cities of West Bengal analyses ward-level data from the
2011 Census and reveals a high degree of spatial
segregation by caste. In each of these cities, caste-based
spatial segregation is more pronounced than
segregation by socio-economic status. The study also
finds a significant negative correlation between wards
with a greater proportion of Scheduled Caste and
Scheduled Tribe population and household access to
public, private and aspirational goods. This calls for a
more inclusive understanding of segregation.

Examination of the city-level infrastructure data from Census databases reveals that improvements in both social and physical infrastructure parameters have occurred in class-I cities of West Bengal but not in economic infrastructure aspects while access to basic amenities and assets has improved only slightly at the household level. However, cities situated in the lowermost infrastructural development categories dominate the urban scene in this state. Furthermore, any discernible improvements in infrastructural facilities during the last decade are totally confined to a few large cities like Kolkata, Howrah, Asansol, Durgapur, Siliguri, Burdwan and Bally. As regards the overall infrastructural development, about 48 per cent of the class-I cities experienced a very low-to-low level improvement in facilities in 2011, implying the dismal status of infrastructure in the smaller class-I cities. The pace in growth of infrastructure facilities in large cities is sluggish compared to many medium and small centres, due to their inability to update the existing infrastructure base up to the required level to meet burgeoning civic demands. Whatever success is gained is disproportionately distributed across the class-I cities of the state, highlighting the tremendous inter-city disparity.