 Well, I wasn't supposed to be here and that's a great pleasure to be here The last thing I was expecting is to be chairing a session. That's here. I am Just a few remarks. I thought I'll just make a few remarks on the context of the city the context of housing in the city and Housing finance. I think these are the three major issues. I think which will probably creep up in the discussions that we're gonna have When I was a president of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce a few years ago I had a small survey of CEOs and asked them a very simple question Are you upsizing or downsizing in Bombay and give me the reasons why you're doing what you're doing? About 80% of CEOs said they were downsizing in Bombay and the reason was The first top most reason was the cost of doing business Two was the labor market the difficulty of attracting people to the city From outside so you had to rely on the local labor market The problems of social infrastructure Getting into clubs getting kids into schools and the physical infrastructure and the traffic and all the other Associated problems and we have seen since then of course the situation getting worse and we have seen the rise of other cities Chennai Hyderabad Pune a whole range of cities that are really looking at the back offices of a lot of the companies that still headquartered in Bombay So there is this context The housing context really is being a major issue and we go back joking for how many years 25 30 years in the 70s the whole debate was housing rights. I mean just Fighting for the people for the right to live in slums. I mean to live in informal settlements Because the bulldozers were very prevalent in those days And that battle was one after a decade of I think very vigorous Debate as well as activism Now of course the issues how do we house them? I don't think anybody's talking about bulldozing the poor. I Think that the the improvements of infrastructure in Bombay are really creating this whole issue of project affected people You know, you have to make room for infrastructure You've got a widened roads you have to build bridges and obviously any infrastructure you put in is going to displace people So in a sense a lot of the discussion took place about five years ago on how we are going to Replay rehouse people in projected affected areas and I think that triggered a lot of Thinking about how we can actually broaden that scope to be on the project affected people So you're seeing that emerge to my mind There are two or three very basic issues and I think they will crop up in the discussion Is that the biggest issue for housing the poor is going to be the issue of land? The land supply curve in Bombay is extremely steep. It's very elastic So a small change in shift in demand means a huge increase in prices and Rather small response on quantity on the ground and we are seeing that today I mean you're seeing at the high end a thousand dollars a square foot is what the What our residential premise costs you and those costs of course go down right through the market But if you thought of conditions more favorable to having slums and Informal settlements and a lack of improvement. You could not think of a more favorable circumstance that Bombay has today In a sense. We need a revolution in terms of the context of which housing has done I think a lot of solutions are found within the constraints that we ourselves have said So if you start opening up those boundaries, you can get much more done much more quickly We have an act which was mentioned the urban land sealing act which this state is the last to remove Almost every state has removed the urban land sealing act for some reason Maharashtra will hang on to the ULC and I got I suspect it has a lot to do with Bombay The second is the rent act. We have a very very draconian rent act Which actually limits the rental housing that's available. You have a planning process which requires 65 permissions to even start moving and it takes you two and a half years to get projects off the ground that has been crashed a little But it's still a very tortuous process So all of this makes the supply curve extremely inelastic so any change in demand will be price driven rather than Supply driven on the ground And finally, let me just come to housing finance I was involved in the cherishes on the board with me But I've been involved with the housing finance company which we have set up for last 30 years And we've got the experience of now it's become a hugely successful conglomerate of financial institutions But even 30 years down the road if you look at the profile and portfolio of HDFC's Customers, they are salaried organized people There are very few people who finance the self-employed and The self-employed are the ones who live in informal settlements. It's not that they don't have money It's not that they don't have cash flows. It's just that we don't have a system That would take those risks with those cash flows I was with my bank reviewing some of the delinquency issues only yesterday and We looked at the whole banking system And we saw that at the end of the day the delinquency ratios that the banks are finding of of loans above 200,000 and with incomes household incomes of less than 20,000 rupees a month is extremely high So what you're gonna have is a lot of institutions falling out of the space and That's going to really affect the demand side For people to enter the housing market. So if they cannot get housing finance It can't enter the market and on the supply side, you have an extremely elastic supply curve Which is not creating the sort of housing that we need. So you have a double whammy here Which is going to affect housing for the poor In a sense Kirtisha Who did a lot of the fighting on housing rights about 20 years ago? I love the statement. He made many At it I think at an international conference. He says, you know, India has two major institutions for housing hotco and HDFC hotco is the housing and urban Development Corporation sits in Delhi and HDFC was the housing finance Institution that I was involved with I Said the trouble is that one understands nothing about housing Which is supposed to be HDFC and one understands nothing about finance Which is hotco so So, you know, you have this you have this dilemma that you have an institutional structure But in a guess I think what India I'm going to stop in one second India has an emerging first world financial sector and And you have third world problems very much like South Africa, so I think that is going to be the issues How do you bridge this gap? Thank you very much? I'm sorry if I've taken a little longer. Thank you Nasser You