India's Urban Poor Can Fit Into One City

Development authorities in Uttar Pradesh recently ran out of land to build affordable houses. Earlier, Union Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu had said one of the biggest challenges before the 'Housing For All' mission was to find enough land for building housing projects for the urban poor.

Why this assumption may not be true

The earth has plenty of space left for us human beings but we prefer proximity to space. This is the reason why all the people on earth live on one per cent of total available land, with half the world population living in urban areas. However, while most government policies are formed on the assumption that there is not enough space to house the urban poor, what we really want is proximity.

A large fraction of urban land in India is owned by the government. It is estimated that 30-40 per cent of the urban land lies with state, central or local governments and various government organisations. Such land, often among the most valuable parcels in a city, is lying idle. Unless the government sells off large tracts of land by repealing certain laws that prevent it from doing so, urban population will keep suffering the space crunch.

Even when land is not in the hands of the government, there is much opposition to developing it. National capital Delhi's Lutyens' zone is an example of that. While real estate in Lutyens' zone is more expensive than that in many parts of London or New York, zoning regulations prevent this land from being redeveloped. There is no reason why authorities cannot allow people to redevelop Lutyens' zone -- at an FAR of 25 or more, if such levels are followed in central areas of other global cities. (FAR or floor area ratio is the ratio of the floor area in a building to the area of the plot)

All this, however, does not capture the extent to which we underestimate the abundance of land. In fact, the whole of humanity can fit into one city. If we house all the people in the world at the floor area ratio levels of New York, they will fit into Texas, which is spread in about 2,62,000 square miles.

Going by the same logic, only two million hectares of the total 329 million hectares of land available in India is developed. This developed land is enough to house over 1,250 million people. On the other hand, the total available land on earth is about 196.9 million square miles, about 759 times the land in Texas. This means that at New York's density levels, the earth can hold 759 times as many people; that is, much more than 5,000 billion people. This means even if the world population rises hundreds of times, we will still be scratching the surface of the earth.

However, proximity is not all that we need; we also need space and resources. If everybody lives in Texas, they will need land elsewhere for agriculture and other productive activities, such as manufacturing and mining. They will also need more water and other resources that one city like Texas cannot provide. But this does not change the fundamental issue that the needs of people are more complex than authorities assume.