 Two years back, in March 2020, a mass exodus of migrant workers from the cities to villages took place. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, a sudden lockdown left thousands of migrant workers on roads seen walking hundreds of miles to reach their villages or, in their words, home. This incident raised a number of questions about the financial and social insecurity that a huge section of the service provider community faced. Most people left the cities at that point of time, mainly because of two reasons. One, because of the lockdown, employment was at a halt. And the second, and the most important one, was unaffordable and unhygienic housing conditions where these workers and their families lived. As COVID-19 spread rapidly in dense informal settlements during the first wave, the problem of congestion, lack of water and sanitation experienced by the urban poor, including migrants, were brought back into focus. It seems that government too had suddenly realized that a large section of its workforce doesn't have affordable and livable houses in the cities where they come for their livelihood. So, to combat this problem, the Modi government came up with a new scheme called ARHC or the Affordable Rental Housing Complex. In simple words, this scheme focuses on providing affordable rental houses to urban poor, migrant workers, street vendors and people belonging to EWS categories. This scheme was launched in July 2020, four months after the lockdown and is a part of PM Modi's ongoing scheme Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. It is being implemented in partnership between the public and private sectors and offers two models. In the first model, the government converts all the vacant houses built under the previous housing schemes such as Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojana and Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. The government included private real estate companies in this model to renovate these houses. In the second model, the ARHC scheme provides a specific regulatory framework to facilitate the construction of rental complexes. Each complex is supposed to have a minimum of 40 apartments, including singles, doubles and dormitories. The private developers will take care of the maintenance and infrastructure of these complexes. Further, the scheme includes special provision around the land use permits to add 50% more floor space in plots without paying a premium and more importantly exemptions from the existing rent control laws. Providing trunk infrastructures such as roads and electricity is also the responsibility of local municipalities. The indifference between this scheme and the previous schemes that aim to provide affordable housing is that before this, all housing schemes run by the government focused on house ownership. Even in PM Awas Yojana, house ownership is incentivized through loans and subsidies to beneficiaries. Now, as per the government data, there are about 1 crore-90 lakh under-constructed and vacant houses in the country. These houses were built under the previous housing schemes for urban poor. So, the question here is, has this scheme been able to bring any real change on the ground? And if yes, why don't we hear more about it? In this video, we will discuss the progress of this scheme and the challenges and concerns flagged by many state governments and civil society bodies. It's been two years since the scheme launched and Chandigarh is the only place that has been able to convert all its vacant houses into ARHC rental homes. Let alone converting, there are still two state governments that haven't signed the MOA, a Memorandum of Affiliation with the central government on this scheme. One of the major issues is the lack of coordination between the states and the central government. Since the old housing schemes focused on the ownership of the houses, the rental scheme disrupted the planning of the state governments under the purview of the old scheme. The two states that haven't signed the MOA yet are Delhi and West Bengal. Delhi recently agreed to come on board with the central government but with the condition that central government will leave 18,000 houses as these houses are already in the process of allotment under the purview of the previous housing schemes. We were facing one more problem because it wasn't clear how to implement this scheme, what will be its reasons, who will regulate it, and what we have done. So that is also a condition of confusion. I am not talking about Delhi, it must have happened in many states and it doesn't seem to have been implemented at a very high level. There is still a lot to be done in the process of these consultations. In August 2021, the India Housing Report along with the Centre for Policy Research and Working People's Chartered studied this scheme in 10 cities. The biggest problem is that most of these housing complexes are located on the outskirts of the cities. Due to their peripheral locations, connectivity through public transportation is almost zero. This is also the main reason that these houses are still vacant. To understand the first model of this scheme, newsclicks team also travelled to one of the vacant housing complexes in Delhi's Sevda Kheda area. This complex might soon be a part of ARHC scheme. In our report, we found that the project is located around 25km away from New Delhi railway station and takes almost 2 hours from the city centres to reach there. The infrastructure of the building was also lying in poor condition with access to occasional water service and no public transportation. All these factors raised some serious questions about the conceptualisation of this scheme. Right now they are focusing only on the already existing houses that have been constructed under various schemes and just imagine the houses that were constructed for the poor of the cities. If they have not been occupied in such a long span of 10-15 years, why would somebody now go and dig them on a rental basis whereas the same houses were supposed to be given to them either free of cost or maybe some nominal amount. Where are these houses? They have not constructed any new houses under the ARHC. It's all the houses that have been constructed either BSUP, that's the basic service to the urban plan or the JNNURM still existing or the Rajeeva Vaas Yojana and then the Rajeeva Vaas Yojana metamorphosis into the Prime Minister's PMAY. So it's PMAY also which is there. So that's I think something very interesting because they have not taken that into concentration. That's the first thing. The second thing is if you see the quality of the construction in most of these houses, even the cattle wouldn't like to stay in those houses. So I think that quality of construction is major because some of the places that were visited shows a completely deplorable state of affairs and construction. So I don't think anyone would love to go there. And mark my words, I mean the houses that they've constructed are new slums. A slums designed and constructed by the parasitals or even by the city government. In this discussion, there is one question related to affordability. What do we consider to be an affordable rental space? In India, a house is considered affordable for the lower income group if the rent does not exceed 30% of the households in monthly income. This benchmark was said by Task Force in 2008 under the guidance of the Union, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. Similarly, migrant workers live in a very different pattern. Studies show that the workers share rooms and on average pay between 500 to 700 per month on individual basis. How does this scheme address the complexities of living status? As we noted in the report, the projected rents that are listed in the policy document, for instance they say for a single bed, I mean for a single bed in dormitory housing which they envision being constructed, they're estimating a rent of 3,000 rupees a month. Now this is based on our study of migrant workers as we said. This is anywhere from three times to one and a half times more than roughly three to four times more than most workers are paying currently. So it's not clear how this is going to be in any way more affordable. There doesn't seem to be actually any provision for ensuring these rents are affordable. It seems to rather just be assumed that just by increasing the amount of housing stock, rents will come down and as I noted earlier it's not clear how this scheme will increase the amount of housing stock either. So I would agree with your interview in the Delhi government that the entire scheme seems quite incoherent. It's not clear what this is intended to achieve beyond the announcement. Since the scheme is exempted from rental laws and private companies play an important role here, there is this constant fear that if all the stakeholders' voices are not taken into account, which includes the civil society, trade unions and workers' welfare organizations, this scheme will soon become a profit-making machine for private companies rather than a welfare program. As a result of these issues, the government can only fully implement this scheme if it takes a proactive approach to address these issues.