New Delhi: The season’s manifestos, read in sequence, make affordable housing look like a solved problem: every major party has committed to units, subsidies or both. What none of the documents grapples with is the constraint that has quietly governed every previous scheme — the condition of land title.
India’s affordable housing shortfall is not, at the margin, a construction problem. Builders can deliver units at the promised price points. The persistent failure point is legal: parcels assembled for such projects often carry encumbrances, disputed succession or agricultural-designation histories that complicate mortgage finance and, eventually, resale.
A flat without a clean title is not an asset; it is an argument. The state that fixes titling will do more for housing than the state that subsidises it.
The economics are unforgiving. Lenders price title risk into interest rates for lower-income borrowers, which pushes monthly payments beyond the very households the schemes target. Titling reform — conclusive, guaranteed, digitised — would collapse that premium overnight.
Some states have begun. Pilot land-records programmes have digitised millions of parcels, though digitisation alone records what exists; it does not adjudicate what is disputed. The harder legal work — conclusive titles backed by an indemnity fund — remains rare.
Housing analysts say the manifesto that first commits to a titling deadline, rather than a unit count, will be the one that actually delivers the houses the others keep promising.
