1 Introduction

The paper evaluates neoliberalism and its eventual introduction into India’s urban housing sector. The research focuses on the following two fundamental research questions.

  1. i.

    How have neoliberal principles advanced in India’s housing policy?

  2. ii.

    What are the consequences of neoliberalism in India’s housing sector?

The motivation for the research comes from the existing limitation of the neoliberalism narrative in India’s urban policy domain. The research responds to the first research question through “content analysis” of macro-level data from the Census and five-year plans. The second research question is answered by “consequential analysis” of the macro data of Indian cities.

Liberalism refers to a self-justifying political concept that centers on protecting individual liberty against different types of threats or coercion. Contrary to classical liberalism, neoliberalism opens new spheres of economic and individual freedom, asserting the revolutionary market power (Gane, 2015). Neoliberal thought emerges in the “liminal space” between communism and capitalism as a particular matter of liberal thoughts (Bockman, 2007; Thorsen & Lie, 2007). Between 1930 and 1960, neoliberalism was accompanied by Friedrich Hayek’s contribution and the Chicago school’s counter-Keynesian economics. Until 1970, neoliberalism was signified as an economic theory. In the 1980s, neoliberalism expressed the deregulation of markets, privatization, and the withdrawal of the welfare state. By the early 1990s, neoliberalism was used loosely in literature (Venugopal, 2015). Deepening and widening transnational connections were observed during neoliberal globalization. Some of these relationships might be rooted in the colonial and neo-colonial phases (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberals are known as antagonists of monopolies and unions (Gertz & Kharas, 2019). Neoliberalism comprises a set of institutions composed of various concepts, policies, and methods for organizing political and economic activities. Neoliberal institutions are formal and informal without robust unionism for collective negotiation (Campbell & Pedersen, 2001). Recent neoliberalism theories have retreated from appreciating the long-term phenomenon of sociocultural changes (Barnett, 2005). Mudge (2008) comprehensively delineates neoliberalism in three fields – politics (governance by experts and elites), policy (privatization, deregulation, liberalization), and intellectual or academic (free market, efficiency) (Mudge, 2008). Harvey (2005) echoes the thought of “the central values of civilization” (Harvey, 2005). As of today, neoliberalism has become a universal concept in critical discourse from being a term rarely used before the early 1990s (Flew, 2014).

Many experts criticize neoliberalism as hegemonic because international institutions propagate it (e.g., the World Bank) to impose policies on countries (Castree, 2006). Understandably, the anti-neoliberal rhetoric originates from anti-globalization thoughts. It is particularly difficult for develo** countries as the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. The challenge for develo** countries arises due to their inability to access global markets at a time when the domestic market has become easily accessible for global multinational enterprises. It becomes problematic for the country’s macroeconomic stability, long-term growth, rising inequality, institutional ability, human capital, and technological development. Harvey (2007) criticizes neoliberalism due to its limited capacities as an engine of growth and its influence on channeling wealth from the subordinate class to the dominant class and from poor to rich countries (Harvey, 2007). It’s not easy to disrupt ties either from globalization or neoliberalism as it becomes integrated rhetoric of policy practice, social behavior, political exposures, and academic thoughts. Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) characterize neoliberalism as “capitalism in its millennial display” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2000). The capitalist world rushes towards neoliberalization as a response to a series of approximations and erratic experiments articulating the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the 1990s (Harvey, 2005). Davies (2017) criticizes neoliberalism due to its excessive dependence on the authority of economics (and economists) to dictate legitimate courses of action (Davies, 2017). The popularity of neoliberalism in emerging markets peaked in the 1990s. China’s success is considered the neoliberal narrative of superior economic performance due to the market-oriented reforms (Gertz & Kharas, 2019). In addition to reform, China encourages intense domestic competition to help create its global companies and support the state with adequate funding (Leipziger, 2019).

The article consists of six sections. Section 2 articulates a comprehensive and lucid review of neoliberalism in the housing sector. Section 3 presents the research methodology adopted to build on a logical narrative of India’s urban housing dilemma and neoliberalism. Section 4 reviews India’s urban housing policy to comprehend the influence of neoliberalism on India’s urban housing sector. Traditionally, urban housing policy was addressed through the Planning Commission’s five-year policy frameworks. Post-dissolution of the Planning Commission, the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) envisages and implements housing policies. Section 5 analyzes the performance of urban housing policy using “content analysis” and “consequential analysis”. Such methods facilitate comprehension and interpretation through a “thick description” of policy contents largely collated from five-year plans, census, and policy documents. Section 6 commences the paper with the relevant discussion from the analysis. The research contributes to understanding the evolution of neoliberal principles and their consequences in the Indian urban housing sector.

2 Literature review

Neoliberalism promotes market-oriented fundamentals within the state-endorsed institutional rules and individual conduct in manners concurrent with a specific ethical and political vision (Davies, 2014). One of the key principles of neoliberalism is that it prioritizes competition as a catalyst for innovation and progress and curbs the power of large corporations. Originally, neoliberal thoughts referred to self-regulating markets facilitating the optimal allocation of investments and resources. In reality, the neoliberal discourse has generated a pervasive market, creating new forms of social polarization and intensifying uneven development at all spatial hierarchies. The present process of neoliberalization is taking different patterns in each nation following the pre-existing institutional system and regulatory mechanism (Afenah, 2009). The influence of neoliberalism on cities and housing has transformed into a ‘commodity of choice’ supporting corporate finance. The notion that housing is integral to people’s wellbeing is challenged in the neoliberal era by the pace at which financial corporations and capital are capturing housing and real estate. In spite of considerable technological advances in construction and investment, so many people are still living in such poor conditions. It is not only evident in the develo** economies but also visible in the relatively wealthy nations that are struggling to provide adequate housing for their entire populations. This reluctance is an antipathy to welfare expenditure as housing reinforces societal inequalities (Jacobs, 2019).

Housing policy during neoliberalization is characterized by the expanding mortgage-backed homeownership, reduction of social housing, tax incentives and facilitation of public–private partnerships for the regeneration of social housing for low-income people (Byrne & Norris, 2022). Neoliberalism envisaged promoting the financial autonomy of households, restructuring state provisions, and reinforcing the private sector and market influence as the prescription in housing policy. However, different regions of the world experience uneven impacts on their housing sector. In East Asia, the local socioeconomic and political conditions impacted housing policy restructuring in the last decade. The global neoliberal housing policy regarding housing privatization and financialization coexisted with the evolution of the “developmental state” and welfare systems. The states intervened to achieve social and political objectives for public housing constructions. Hong Kong is a market-driven city and yet, surprisingly, supports the second-largest public housing program in the world. Some of the Western capitalist states also intervene in the housing market to maintain stability. Such developmental states do not consider interventions as contradictory to the freedom of the market. These states do not endorse the market as an end to maintain growth and increase prosperity.

The Netherlands, a Western welfare state, regarded housing as a merit good in society. The state intervened and redistributed housing to reduce the social imbalance. Neoliberalism-induced deregulation in the Netherlands’ housing market means a lesser governmental role in financing housing production, restricted to ‘social’ rental and ‘social’ owner-occupied housing. The target group of social housing has been reformed during the market-oriented process. Initially, large social housing projects were aimed at skilled labor. Later, households who could afford it moved out from the social housing sector. Thus, social housing specifically for low-income or unemployed populations (e.g., students, migrants, single-parent or two-parent families, and older populations) has evolved (Qian et al., 2019). In the United Kingdom, funding as subsidies has expanded in the neoliberal era for home ownership among the higher classes, while the working-class populations are housed in private sector rental housing. People on low incomes can access government subsidies to house in unregulated private sector rental housing. Like in the Netherlands, new ‘social’ housing is constructed as a by-product of private developers' real estate expansion in the private market homes (Beswick et al., 2019). In Ireland, the proportion of households living in social housing declined during the market transformation. Reliance on subsidized private rented housing increased markedly at the same time (Byrne & Norris, 2022).

The situation is similar even in develo** economies. In Bangladesh, the enabler approach to housing due to neoliberal policies resulted in public housing projects disproportionately favouring the middle and high-income groups rather than the poor (Lata, 2020). In Ghana, the adoption of a neoliberal housing policy has led to unaffordable private housing by the low-income groups developed by the private sector. The land and housing market liberalization steered to speculative and escalating housing prices (Taruvinga & Mooya, 2018).

The existing literature suggests a greater aberration in the output of neoliberal policies than how it was originally envisaged. Neoliberal policies have created pervasive markets, newer typologies of social polarization and commodification of basic wellbeing necessities like housing. The Western capitalist market cleverly transformed itself towards neoliberalism as a measure against erratic experiments of the ‘Washington Consensus’. Some of the developed economies of the West (e.g., The Netherlands) and East (e.g., Hong Kong) are applying state interventions through welfare policies to soften the neoliberal policy’s impacts. However, the existing literature reveals concerns about research gaps in develo** economies that struggle with large-scale deprivation and inequality and yet focus on implementing neoliberal policies.

The research contributes to filling the existing research gaps in develo** economies by integrating “content analysis” and “consequential analysis” as scientific policy analysis tools and highlighting the contradicting state of urban housing and neoliberal policy. It captures the impacts of neoliberal policies at present and systematically analyses the impact of neoliberal policy’s gradual integration into India’s housing policy. The learnings from the research will be particularly beneficial for develo** economies like India, where neoliberal policies are implemented, and yet a significant portion of people are either homeless or live in substandard housing conditions.

3 Research methodology

Social science research contributes to reorienting housing research around the conceptual understanding of dwelling units. Even though such research is largely narrative or qualitative, its qualitative approach is particularly helpful in understanding the impacts of policies and economic conditions of various kinds of housing programs operated in develo** countries. “The narrative inquiry is a valuable investigative technique both for qualitative and quantitative research, as these offer a different way of knowing, investigating the lived experiences of individuals, and exploring subjectivity. Narrative knowledge is created and constructed through the stories of lived experience and sense-making, the meanings people afford to them, and therefore offers the gainful perception of complicated human lives, behaviors, and cultures. Storytelling does not substitute analytical aptitude but rather complements it to visualize novel outlooks (Biswas, 2008) (Biswas, 2021).

Such research methodologies bring out different problems of housing conditions in develo** economies that cannot be solved by counting attributes. Qualitative research augments our understanding of the research process and networking. It also allows for rediscovering facts between the program design and the complicated history of the institutional evolution (Peattie, 1983). The present research uses a mixed research method combining “content analysis” and “consequential analysis” to understand the housing systems under neoliberalism's influence and analyze, describe, and map the processes. The approaches allow us to understand social reality by stressing an evolving, negotiated view of social order, emphasizing processes and meanings that are not measured rigorously. The methods help identify the meaning, intent, and motivation of human actions (Dandekar, 2005). The pattern of considering housing as a process channelize our thinking regarding informational requirements for analysis. A method for safeguarding information on innovative housing approaches is derived through the omnipresent resource flow network and housing institutions (Peattie, 1983). The methods are categorized in the milieu. This research method illustrates how planners use various qualitative methods, drawn broadly from various fields within and outside the social sciences, and how these contribute to practice and theory to understand the relationship between physical outcomes and the economic functioning of cities and city regions.

Sood & Biswas used content analysis to evaluate the efficiency of urban development plans (Sood & Biswas, 2023). Tandarić, Ives, & Watkins (Tandarić et al., 2022) used textual data from urban planning policy documents to infer their contents into the analytical output (Tandarić et al., 2022). All the purposes of scientific research in urban studies and planning, i.e., exploration, description, explanation, understanding, prediction, evaluation, and impact assessment, can be performed with qualitative content analysis. In urban planning research, the units of analysis selection are affected by the type of data and the purpose of their collection and analysis. Urban planning research and urban studies mostly use the “conventional content analysis” to study the existing theory or research literature about a phenomenon, where the researcher seeks to create a preliminary description of the phenomenon (Sheydayi & Dadashpoor, 2023). Content analysis allows the researchers to generate concrete and specific theoretical understanding from the data (Anacker & Niedt, 2023; Yerena, 2023). The idea of consequential analysis comes from deep-rooted teleological theories that are broadly divided into consequentialism (utilitarianism) and virtue ethics. Consequential analysis assesses the goodness or badness of their policy consequences. This excludes any consideration of the morality of the process (Wells, 2013). In recent years, Biswas (2019) has used consequentialism to analyse urban policy (Biswas, 2019).

4 Review of urban housing policy

The volume of public housing continues to shrink under neoliberalism and privatization of housing. The states are also finding it hard to generate enough financial capacity and human resources for the sector’s growth (Tsenkova & Polanska, 2014). Neoliberalism also shifts a government’s housing policy approach from direct provisions to strengthening institutional capacity, allowing private enterprises for housing supply, and delegating authority to local and state administration without much resource allocation. The ascent of neoliberalism is generally taking place against the decaying welfare state. A welfare state focuses on state support for the inseparable commodities of land and housing along with labor market restructuring. A secured land tenure ship facilitates capability enhancement with or without using the land as a commodity or resource (Mazer, 2019).

The urban housing program primarily consists of housing schemes, legislative backup, and loan schemes. The paper reviews all the five-year plans chronologically and categorizes all the relevant urban housing policies by the government of India (Government of India, 2014). Indian housing policy can be classified in three directions:

  1. i.

    direct intervention,

  2. ii.

    enabler for private actors, and

  3. iii.

    support for institutional, legislative, and financial capacities.

In this paper, I have used content analysis of India’s housing policy since independence to distinguish its approach among the three directions. India witnessed prolonged government control in the housing sector after its independence. The initial three five-year plans (1951–56, 1956–61, and 1961–66) mostly focused on institutional capacity development and direct support for urban housing provision. These three plans also recognized the need for individual and cooperative investment in urban housing. Accessibility to cheap land was a major constraint for urban housing, even during the early phase of nation-building. India’s fragmented monarch system of governance before the two-hundred-year-long colonial rule created extremely lopsided land ownership among its citizens. Many Indian citizens were deprived of land even after abolishing monarchic titles and becoming a republic. Without a structured post-independence land policy, the polarization of land tenure has remained a persisting national conflict. The much-needed land reform was elusive except in the state of Kerala, where the agricultural worker-tenant was granted land rights as part of this reform process (Rao, 2004). The fourth (1969–1974) and fifth (1974–1979) five-year plans continued the direct intervention by the state to provide urban housing. The government associated public sector support to urban housing provision among the government employees, plantation laborers, Dock laborers, etc. Housing for industrial workers and public sector employees constituted the largest share of urban housing stock, which took care of migrated workers and public sector employees’ housing woes (Tiwari & Rao, 2016).

Sibal (2012) notes that during the period between 1965 and 1981, regulatory restrictions in India increased with more controls, including domestic business regulations by the ‘Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1969’, banking sector nationalization by the ‘Banking Companies Act 1969’, productivity control by the ‘Industrial Licensing Acts 1970 and 1973’, foreign investment restriction by the ‘Foreign Exchange Regulation Act 1973, and curb on land price escalations, encouraging low-income housing by the socialization of urban land through the ‘Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act 1976’ (Acharya, 1987; Sibal, 2012). Therefore, the period from 1950 to 1980 is referred to as the ‘Indian-socialist’ period” (Virmani, 2004). India was growing fast by the late 1980s. Still, it started borrowing worryingly, amplifying its fiscal deficit and international debt beyond an untenable debt-service ratio (Basu & Maertens, 2007).

The first instance of liberalism in the Indian economy came along in the 1980s with the increasing internationalization of trade and services. It subsequently influenced the urban housing sector from the sixth five-year plan (1980–1985). Sixth (1980–1985), seventh (1985–1990), and eighth (1992–1997) five-year plans provided greater stimulus and support to private housing even for the middle and lower-income groups and institutionalized housing finance for the state housing boards and retail borrowers. The ninth (1997–2002) and tenth (2002–2007) five-year plans paved the way for a swee** transformation of urban housing towards neoliberalism and privatization. During these periods, urban housing transformed from a ‘basic need’ or a commodity to a sector for trade, investment, and the generator of employment opportunities. The government also benefitted from increased direct and indirect tax revenue. The economic liberalization that removed government control of many industries and services and connected India with the wider globalized world came along in the year 1991. Following the economic liberalization, the government’s focus on the following five-year plans (till the eleventh (2007–2012) plan) was restricted to creating an enabling environment through modification of the existing legal, regulatory, and financial regime. The government restricted itself as a direct housing supplier and facilitated privates and cooperatives to lead in providing urban housing. Direct housing provisions transformed into enabling strategies like subsidy, long-term credit, land allocation through leasehold or proprietorship mode, and cross-subsidization linked with housing for economically weaker sections. The government also encouraged business opportunities in urban housing through crucial legislation like the ‘Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act 2016’ and financial policies like liberal foreign direct investment (FDI) for the integrated townships.

After discontinuing the Planning Commission in 2014, housing for all 2015 remains the major housing program in India. Housing for all aimed to provide urban housing supply to all by the year 2022 by subsuming four earlier adopted strategies: in-situ slum redevelopment (ISSR), Credit linked subsidy scheme (CLSS), Affordable housing in partnership (AHP), and Beneficiary-led individual house construction/enhancements (BLC). The government adopted a mixed approach by combining limited “direct intervention” and mostly “enabling” private actors to provide housing. The government also adopted a regulatory path to standardize real estate development by formulating the ‘Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act 2016’. The act was necessary to support homebuyers and encourage further investment in the sector, particularly after the emergence of neoliberal policies. The government introduced the ‘Model Tenancy Act 2021’, revealing its intentions to use regulation to correct the market imperfections in the housing supply, including rental housing. After COVID-19, a new scheme titled affordable rental housing complexes (ARHCs) was introduced in 2021 to support urban migrants and the urban poor. However, the scheme will have limited intervention as it only focuses on government-funded converting vacant houses into affordable rental housing complexes primarily through public–private partnership (PPP).

5 Data analysis

The housing policy analysis follows a qualitative content and consequential policy analysis (Biswas, 2019) from the obtained housing policy contents. The textual data analysis of a wide range of logical procedures like reading, manual coding, sorting, and data classification (Odoyi & Riekkinen, 2022) (Fig. 1). However, the present research refrains from determining the moral rightness of an act depending on a policy’s consequences or the goodness of consequences. Each five-year plan’s policy approach is classified into horizontal and vertical consequences. The horizontal consequences signify the goodness of the policy between direct and indirect interventions (e.g., subsidy, stimulus, budgetary support, PPP, enabling framework, etc.) between social approaches and privatized approaches to housing policy. In contrast, the vertical consequences signify the adaptation and revision of housing policy.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Goodness of policy housing policy analysis since the sixth ‘Five-year’ plan

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The Fourth Five-Year Plan (1969–1974) proposed investment in housing from the private sector. Acknowledging the private sector’s contribution to meeting the housing demand is to recognize the urgency of housing supply from the housing requirement across all economic groups and the government’s limitation to housing supply. Encouraging private sectors for housing supply across all housing typologies continued during the Fifth (1974 –1979) and Sixth (1980 – 1985) Five-year plans. India witnessed the beginning of economic and policy reform during the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1985 – 1990). I have included a housing policy analysis from the sixth plan in this section.

From the sixth ‘Five-year’ plan onwards, the government confined its direct intervention only to house government employees. The approach received a marginal revision in the seventh and eighth ‘Five-year’ plans when slum, urban poor, and working women were included in the direct housing supply schemes. However, such a social policy approach toward housing supply has been discontinued since then. The first hint of neoliberal policy was experienced during the ninth ‘Five-year’ plan (1997 – 2002), almost six years after the economic liberalization in 1991. Housing for the urban poor and slums, considered the most difficult propositions in Indian cities, was addressed through PPP and land supply to housing rather than the government’s direct intervention. Supplying inexpensive and adequate land across different parts of the city continued to be an enabling effort by the government in the consequent five-year plans. However, the government refrained from any direct involvement like land banking or purchasing land for housing. In the tenth ‘Five-year’ plan, the government further liberalized the housing supply for the middle-income group (MIG) and the high-income group (HIG) by allowing 100% FDI in real estate and integrated townships. In the eleventh ‘Five-year’ plan, the process of housing market liberalization was incentivized further by augmenting a well-functioning housing market, including rental housing. Subsequently, the twelfth ‘Five-year’ plan refocused on land supply for the housing market of the urban poor. Cross-subsidization is a neoliberal policy tool that was introduced along with real estate policies. It ensured that 20–25% of developed land is reserved for economically vulnerable sections.

In 2014, India’s policy planning went through reform with the abolition of the Planning Commission. In the post-Planning Commission phase, housing policy is spearheaded by the “Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana” (Prime Minister Housing Scheme) in urban and rural areas. In this period, affordable housing, including rental housing for MIGs and HIGs, is bestowed to the market supply with increased emphasis on PPP. Although direct government intervention was re-introduced for individual housing construction of the urban poor, the major approach to the urban poor’s housing continued to be PPP and cross-subsidization.

Table 1 below particularly explores the implications of housing policy since the sixth Five-year plan over different time periods and examines how the government and market respond to housing policy (Table 1). Since the initial proposal to encourage private sector investment in housing, particularly for MIG and HIG in fourth ‘Five-year plan’, the Government restricted itself towards housing for urban poor. At present, the private sector supply almost entire housing need for MIG and HIG, where the Government only focuses on smoothening of the institutional finance, land, construction materials and other regulatory concerns. For housing supply to economically vulnerable groups, the Government adopts multipronged approach including direct supply, subsidies and PPP.

Table 1 Implications of housing policy over different time periods and respond of government and market
Full size table

I further corroborate the impact of neoliberal policies in the eventual mitigation of urban housing demand from temporal data. Appropriate housing policy helps to reduce the housing shortage. It impacts urban homelessness by improving slum-like situations. In contrast, plan outlay in urban housing as a percentage of GDP shows whether the government focuses on the socialist or neoliberal approach to policymaking. The decadal change in the percentage of urbanization and net rural–urban migration substantiate a continuous growth of urbanization and steady population flow from rural to urban areas. A significant part of these migrants is low and semi-skilled labor. A figure depicting the performance of urban housing in the past seven decades is presented below (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Performance indices of urban housing in India

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In the past seven decades (1941–2011), the decadal change in the percentage of urbanization trends was lower than the peaks in 1941–51 and 1971–81, whereas the net rural–urban migration continues to grow. This implies that rural–urban migration is influencing urban growth more than the natural growth process in India. During the same period, the slum population and urban homeless people’s percentage of the total urban population remained almost the same. The urban population grew from 44.2 million in 1941 to 377.1 million in 2011 during this period. Although the percentage of urban homeless and slum people in Indian cities remains similar, the massive increase in urban population transmits into a considerable increment of urban homeless and slum people.

Interestingly, the plan outlay in urban housing as a percentage of GDP reduced gradually during this period, after its peak in 1971–81. It is particularly alarming as much of the rural–urban migration occurs due to the movement of low-skilled and semi-skilled labor in the informal and semi-formal sectors. This phenomenon is causing a significant housing challenge for Indian cities as the cities struggle with severe housing deficits for the vast number of migrants earning extremely low wedges.

6 Discussions & conclusion

Urban regions use massive public goods that are significantly regulated, i.e., land use and housing. Regulation through policymaking, i.e., urban policy reform, follows complex urban situations supported by new technologies, migration patterns, lifestyles, and economic growth patterns (Storper, 2016). In this backdrop, neoliberal thought is a free expression of state, market, and citizenship. These are the central features of the neoliberal urbanism (Pinson & Journel, 2016). A complete absence of the state in urban housing policies and projects would infer an unlikely situation where the capitalist sector supports the conflicting or loss-making public services. The state facilitates welfare and subsidies to protect the interests of the urban commons and the weaker sections of society. Public private partnerships and joint ventures with private sector entities are tools for the public regime to extend public services in the neoliberal era than privatize public services entirely. Public private participation in urban development and housing projects has become a standard norm for service delivery.

Sassen (1991) criticizes the financial sector’s geographically concentrated growth in a few urban areas for the creation of different classes of people with high incomes, which affects gentrification (Sassen, 1991). Cities, including the urban fringes, have become locations for new forms of development centers as the outcome of neoliberal policy. The land in the urban periphery and suburbs is used for market-friendly growth and elitist consumption (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Some urban governments recognized the increasing problems of gentrification and initiated renewed housing policies, ensuring much public housing at the neighborhood level. Initiatives such as negotiations with the developers to introduce low-income housing helped overcome gentrification (Pinson & Journel, 2016). However, the difficulty of integrating different social classes is halted by modern housing projects, e.g., gated communities, which create physical and psychological barriers. While neoliberalism promotes privatization, the private enterprises’ desire for more profit reverses its competitive advantages (Nelson, 2019). Rampant commercialization of housing may fetch more capital for the capitalist sectors but fails to safeguard the interests of urban common.

Emerging economies like India experience more challenging situations, whether to encourage more privatizations in housing and urban development or to safeguard the large section of homeless and deprived people. The opportunities in the real estate due to the rising incomes and growth of the neo-middle class employed in the service sector create a trade-off between the capitalist form of housing supply (Gopalan & Venkataraman, 2015; Hariharan & Biswas, 2019; Singh et al., 2014). The increased investment in housing supply to financial elites creates a real estate and rental process making it impossible for even middle-class families to afford houses (Sangma, 2006).

Neoliberalism influenced India’s housing policy approaches. India implemented neoliberal policy to automate urbanization and achieve economic prosperity for its citizen. However, it did not transmit desired benefits, like the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea, and China.

Public investment in housing has been reduced with the adaptation of neoliberalism, which also transforms the national government’s housing policy from direct provisions to strengthening institutional capacity, allowing private sectors for housing supply and delegating authority to local and state administration without much resource allocation. Local governments, too, are forced to slash property taxes despite heavily relying on them to fund social services (Nelson, 2019). Financial deregulation transforms housing into a financial asset (Storper, 2016). The trend of private sector investment in housing for the EWS dwindles without direct government spending. Housing oversupply to HIG and the affluent class continues to soar in the urban housing market (Florida, 2018).

This paper contributes to showcases the impact of neoliberal policies in India’s macro situation of housing. The paper uses “content analysis” and “consequential analysis” to decipher India’s housing situation due to neoliberalism. The use of such methodologies helps to qualitatively interpret policy content and its consequences over its implementation period. India’s approach to urban housing strategies combined with direct support in the initial phase after the independence to facilitate housing affordability through incentivizing private enterprises. The social housing policies similar to Europe and the West are absent India. Reducing infrastructure costs to facilitate cheaper housing and expanding basic urban infrastructure has not been achieved at all (Seta et al., 2017). In the future, researchers may emphasize empirical analysis from different categories of cities to create robust evidence and support appropriate housing policymaking.

7 Competing interests

The author declares he has no conflict of interest.