The Quiet Housing Revolution: How the Telugu States Rewrote India's Contract with the Poor
Every generation leaves behind a monument to the society it tried to build. Ancient kingdoms left temples and forts. Industrial economies left railways and factories. Independent India, for much of its first half-century, left something rather less visible: millions of families to build their own homes. For decades after 1947, shelter occupied an odd place in Indian public policy. Governments accepted responsibility for dams, schools, roads and hospitals, but not for ensuring that the poorest citizens had a permanent roof over their heads. Across the country, families erected mud walls, thatched roofs, tin sheds and tarpaulin shelters, adding a brick here and a concrete slab there whenever a harvest was good or a son sent money home from the city. A house was expected to emerge gradually over a lifetime of sacrifice. Poverty was not merely low income; it was also the insecurity of never quite knowing whether the next monsoon or cyclone would leave a family homeless again. That unw...