Room for manoeuvre: tenure and the urban poor in India

This paper examines the economic, social and political processes embedded in the interconnected relationships between tenants and landlords and the workings of informal institutional frameworks that underpin the production, exchange and consumption of rental housing in India. It also takes into consideration how to get tenure onto the policy agenda of national and local governments.

These issues are explored by drawing upon research on the operation of low-income private rental housing markets in two Indian cities, Bangalore and Surat, with an emphasis on landlords.

The five emerging key findings are that rental housing markets are:

• integral to well functioning cities
• an important part of the portfolio of individual and household livelihood strategies for tenants as well as landlords
• influenced by and respond to local conditions
• less exclusionary than ownership markets
• shrouded by insecurity as a result of government attitude.

In addition to examining these findings, the author provides a brief review of the literature relating to housing tenure and gives an overview of the similarities and differences between Surat and Bangalore (for example in relation to migration, employment, ethnic linkages and urban development practices) as these factors substantially underpin social relations that are embedded in the rental housing markets in each city.