URBIZEN

For everyone, their home is their palace, and they are the kings and queens of their own little palaces. But if we start making palaces for everyone, we will only be building castles in the air. The urgent need of the hour is to build more houses, with fewer resources, in the quickest time, for the many seeking a pucca house. We will need to create a paradigm shift in the way we design, engineer and construct social housing in India. If we continue to construct our houses and apartment buildings like we have being doing since the past three decades, it will be impossible to reach our intended target anytime in the foreseeable future. There can be much learned product design and manufacture, including car manufacture. Some of the key aspects that can be directly transferred to house construction are: Modularity: Modularity is a design approach that sub-divides a system into smaller components that can be replicated, scaled, and used in groups or independently. Modularity

(image source: www.urbanland.uli.org) Housing is one of the most important elements of urban development. The current focus on affordable housing in India presents numerous challenges and opportunities at the same time. The housing shortage is growing at more than 6%, and is projected to reach 34 million units by 2022. With high demand, limited resources and time running out, the challenges are obvious. It also cannot be denied that great challenges come with great opportunities. The opportunities and challenges of affordable housing demand innovative solutions from everyone involved – architects, engineers, contractors, developers, and the government. This also presents a unique opportunity to Architects in India to develop design solutions that are unique to the current Indian context. The Architecture fraternity should not miss out on this opportunity to create an impact. There is a generally accepted assumption that affordability is a policy issue, and not a design issue

There is fresh new opportunity for developers, architects, engineers and contractors in India, in the form of Affordable Housing. With a 1.9 Crore (19 million) shortage in urban housing, there is a huge gap that needs to be bridged. The market demand for affordable housing had already existed, but due to absence of an enabling regulatory framework and policies, developers shied away from the sector. The present Central government has formulated several changes in the form of incentives and tax breaks in the Union budget to address the bottlenecks. The primary changes are: 1.      Infrastructure status to the affordable housing sector – This allows the developers to raise funds at lower interest rates. 2.      The maximum permissible size of the apartments was increased to 60 sq.m. of carpet area. 3.      The time limit for completing the projects was increased from three years to five years. 4.      100% deduction of income tax from profits from affordable housin