land pooling

“PSU banks do not provide any kind of credit facilities for people who own lands in the urban villages, they say we belong to the Lal Dora. When we go to the MCD, they say we don’t belong to the Lal Dora and are an urbanised village now,” rues Deepak Tyagi, a 39-year-old resident and RWA president of Budhela village in New Delhi. This intriguing in-between nature of urban villages is what led us to study these areas and the digitalization of land records here. Lal Dora is a red thread that was drawn around the habitation or abadi areas…

With inputs from G S Radhakrishna Within six months of assuming power, Chief Minister Y S Jaganmohan Reddy has undone many things started by his predecessor Chandrababu Naidu. The most contentious being Amaravati, Naidu’s dream capital. The last nail in the Amaravati coffin was hammered by the report of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on January 3rd. Unmindful of the protests across the state, the Jagan government moved quickly to get the three-capital proposal endorsed by the state assembly, where he enjoys a brute majority. The assembly, on January 20th, passed the bill proposing creation of Amravati, Visakhapatnam and Kurnool…

On 11th October the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs notified a land pooling policy under the 2021 Master Plan for Delhi, to address the large scale housing gaps in Delhi. Through this policy, Delhi is set to get 17 lakh new affordable housing units, with a capacity to accommodate 76 lakh people. This policy signals a change in the Delhi Development Authority’s (DDA) model of land acquisition and development to a ‘land pooling model’, where the private sector and land owners are both partners in the development. However, while the policy is a first step, the release of land…

Gone are the stormy days of bifurcation of the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh and the bitter battles over the city of Hyderabad. Today, as Telangana is governed from its centre of power in Hyderabad, neighbouring Andhra waits eagerly for the completion of its planned seat of administration, Amaravati.   In the government’s own words, Amaravati, “the People's capital of Andhra Pradesh, is envisioned to be a city of world-class standards” and one that will provide “cutting-edge infrastructure, comfortable livelihood and immense prosperity”. However, most remarkable about this planned city, being developed from scratch, is the way it has been…