NITI Aayog's Rajiv Gauba says city master plans have constrained rather than expanded affordable housing land, even as PMAY-Urban crosses 1.25 crore sanctioned and over 1 crore completed homes.
If you've ever wondered why affordable housing stays scarce even in cities with plenty of announced schemes, NITI Aayog member Rajiv Gauba gave a pretty direct answer this week. Addressing a national conference on affordable housing reforms in Delhi, Gauba said India's city master plans have not been effective in making sufficient land available for affordable housing, and have instead constrained the supply. That's a notably candid admission from a senior policymaker, since master plans are usually framed as the solution to unplanned growth rather than a contributor to the problem.
Gauba's core argument is that land availability sits at the heart of the affordable housing shortfall, and that land can account for a very high share of a project's total cost, making affordable projects financially unviable in many cities. A joint NITI Aayog and Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs report he referenced proposes reserving at least 10% of residential land in master plans specifically as affordable housing zones, alongside raising the permissible floor area ratio for such projects, promoting transit-oriented development, and enabling land pooling and transferable development rights. He also flagged this year's Budget announcement of a dedicated real estate investment trust meant to unlock land and assets held by central public sector undertakings.
If you assumed this was purely a homeownership conversation, it wasn't. Gauba spent real time on rental housing too, pointing out that ownership isn't the only viable housing solution for migrant workers, industrial labour, students and young professionals, groups for whom renting near their workplace matters more than owning outright. He called for reforms to the tenancy framework to expand affordable rental supply, and pointed to nearly 1 crore vacant houses sitting in urban India, a stock that weak tenancy protections, low rental yields and litigation risk keep out of the active rental market. Unlocking even a portion of that could add rental supply without a single new unit being built.
The same conference carried an update worth sitting with on its own. Satendra Singh, Secretary of the Department of Urban Development, said affordable housing needs to evolve from a scheme-based approach into a full ecosystem offering both ownership and rental options.
He put a number on the government's flagship scheme: more than 1.25 crore houses have been sanctioned under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban, with over 1 crore already completed and handed over to beneficiaries. That's a genuinely large base to build reforms on top of, and it puts Gauba's land-supply critique in a slightly different light. The scheme has delivered at scale, but the next phase of growth depends on fixing a structural land problem that PMAY-Urban alone can't solve.
Most of the implementation Gauba described falls to state and municipal authorities, which is exactly the layer where NCR's own master planning battles have played out recently. If you've been following our coverage of Delhi's newly approved Master Plan 2047, this NITI Aayog push adds useful context: it's a live example of exactly the kind of master plan overhaul Gauba is describing nationally, expanding land use categories and redevelopment norms rather than sticking with a framework that's constrained supply for years.
Whether Delhi's new plan actually reserves land for affordable housing the way Gauba's report recommends is worth watching as implementation details emerge over the coming months.
