micro Home Solutions: Safe & affordable home upgrading in low income urban India

Our innovation directly addresses the most significant barriers to high quality, safe, and affordable home improvement for the urban poor. Low-income households resettled by government after slum evictions are given tiny empty plots of land on the outskirts of the city with unclear titles. Over time, these government development resettlement colonies are haphazardly built into dense low income ghettos.

Unable to produce mortgage documents, the residents of resettlement communities lack access to basic home loans or technical inputs. Households are only able to finance construction through informal money lending sources due to a lack of traditional mortgage documents- at rates as high as 10% per month. The result is a circle of debt that causes many to lose possession of the house to the moneylender, and forces low-income families to build unsafe structures with poor living conditions. Additionally, these families rarely have access to professional technical assistance that allows them to build sound structures that are healthier, longer-lasting, and better designed.

DHS makes currently available housing documentation (i.e. “possession slips”) acceptable for bankable loans and provides the poor with professional input that middle and high-income households take for granted. This allows people to invest in home improvements and construct safer structures, bathrooms, roofs, kitchens & ventilated spaces.

In addition to partnering with MFIs and local NGOs to provide this product, mHS dialogues with policymakers on overall slum rehabilitation policy. We are advocating for security of shelter/tenure over providing home-ownership and for the support of a wider range of shelter options such as rental housing, lease-purchase, and homeless shelters at affordable user-fee rates. Therefore, the potential impact of our new framework on urban housing extends beyond our direct DHS clients to influence large-scale strategies in order to build more inclusive cities.

Yes. Thus far we have worked with financing institutions, with cement companies and seimisic engineering firms. Our aim is to influence self-construction practices and further collaborate with material suppliers once we have a better understanding of the supply-chain.

The partnership are on technical, implementation, architectural R&D and financing. For our pilot, we collaborated with the microfinance entity (BASIX) for provision of finance and working with their sales team for implementation and attracting clients. We held a joint workshop on training of masons to upgrade their skill-sets with ACC Cement and intend to reach out to other cement and material suppliers for R&D and quality materials & preferred rates. In addition, we're partnering with highly specialized engineering firms to provide seismic advice on our R&D for upgradation in the highly earthquake prone zone of Delhi.