THE EDUCATORS' PEN
CBS LINE
CBS LINEVolume 4(8)
Beyond Shelter: Making Sustainable Housing Gender-Inclusive in India
A house is more than just a shelter for a woman. It represents the responsibility she carries, her personal workplace where she cooks, cleans, and cares for her family. It is a significant variable that influences her health, economic opportunities, and her familial status. However, she is often excluded from the decisions pertaining to the same house she runs, even when these decisions have a direct impact on the quality of her life.
A sustainable house is designed, constructed, and maintained in such a way that its impact on the environment is reduced, energy efficiency is ensured, and the overall well-being of inhabitants is addressed. The discussions on sustainable housing emphasise the importance of incorporating sustainability in the design stage of the house, but these discussions often ignore the exclusion of women, a key stakeholder, from contributing to critical decisions related to design and finance. Despite constituting nearly half of the country's population, women remain markedly underrepresented among India's property owners and are rarely consulted in the design of the low-income housing meant to serve them (Agarwal, Anthwal, & Mahesh, 2021; Gaddis, Lahoti, & Swaminathan, 2022). In this context, the present paper examines the relevance of gender to India's sustainable housing agenda, focusing on ownership, design, and decision-making as the three areas where the gap between women and housing is most visible.
Most of the housing decisions depend on who owns the property. It is also one area where there is a significant gender gap in India. Agarwal et al (2021) find that women constitute barely 14 per cent of landowners in rural India, owning just 11 per cent of agricultural land, despite decades of legal reform intended to secure daughters' inheritance rights. Gaddis et al (2022), based on survey data from over 40 developing countries, observe that this pattern extends to housing as well as land. Husbands are more likely than wives to own property, and the gap widens further among poorer and rural households. Joint titling, in which both spouses are named on a housing deed, has been promoted as one remedy, but its adoption in Indian housing schemes remains partial and uneven.
Even when women do have access to formal housing, their voices are often overlooked in housing designs, leading to spaces that do not properly accommodate their needs or comfort. Sunikka-Blank et al (2019), studying slum rehabilitation housing in Mumbai, found that the absence of outdoor and community space in the new housing, combined with cramped kitchens poorly suited to existing cooking practices, sharply increased both electricity use and living costs for the households surveyed. Women, who managed the household economy daily, bore the brunt of this change, leading to time poverty that results in limited opportunities for paid work and self-development. This underscores the fact that sustainable housing is not just about the materials used and energy savings; it is also about designs that incorporate the needs of the women who run the house.
Even where a house has been built and allocated, women often find themselves excluded from decisions about its maintenance and improvement. Routray et al (2017), studying household sanitation decisions in rural Odisha, note that construction of a household latrine was decided exclusively by the male head in 80 per cent of surveyed households, with women deciding only 9 per cent of cases. This indicates that while women are involved in daily decision-making in a household, they have a limited role in influencing decisions on household investments. Meth et al (2019), comparing housing formalisation in India and South Africa, observed that formal titling schemes which were intended to benefit women often improved their material shelter while leaving them without a corresponding voice in decisions about that shelter, producing what the authors describe as a persisting poverty-patriarchy nexus.
Sustainable housing in India will remain incomplete so long as it is designed and evaluated without considering the women who live in it. The evidence reviewed here suggests that closing the ownership gap, redesigning housing around women's actual working lives, and strengthening women's voice in decisions about their homes are not peripheral concerns but conditions for housing to be genuinely sustainable. Ignoring these three aspects, we would still have greener houses, but they would still carry the same mistake that has been a feature of conventional houses, hence preventing them from being truly sustainable.
References
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B., Anthwal, P., & Mahesh, M. (2021). How many and which women own land in
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