Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government cleared a plan this week to build inexpensive rental dwellings in cities for 350,000 workers.Giving rural migrants an incentive to return is crucial to restoring economic activity to pre-Covid levels.
But there’s an opportunity here to do much more. For India to industrialize, rethinking the housing situation will be as important as freeing the urban poor from large medical bills and helping them build retirement savings.
If the country of 1.3 billion people wants to be a factory to the world — the next China — it must start by giving workers low-cost living quarters.India is sitting on an inventory of more than 1.3 million unsold homes.