Some years ago a government engineer won a competition for an ideal house for India with a cement and bamboo structure that cost only eight thousand rupees. The engineer’s proposal won solely on the thrift of its construction. That the structure was ill-lit and poorly ventilated, and entirely unsuited to the needs of its residents didn’t matter. When built in several districts in Rajasthan the houses were never occupied; most were used as storage bins for fodder.

Some of the government’s largest and most visible follies are related to large scale public projects. Ordinary utilitarian buildings such as post offices, bus depots and railway stations are of repeating designs regardless of whether they are built in the deserts of Rajasthan or the peaks of Himachal. Housing work related to the earthquakes of Bhuj, the tsunami in Tamil Nadu, or flood relief in Andhra are invariably over budget. After several years of publicly promoting a national competition for best design the External Affairs building in New Delhi, was eventually awarded to the CPWD. In project after project there are gaping flaws related to design, engineering, construction and finance.

Government intervention in low cost housing is invariably viewed as nothing more than a roof over peoples head. An inept bureaucratic imagination, reigned in by stifling rules, limited budgets and a lack of interest in the sociology of lifestyles has left its mark on some of the country’s most dire and dismal forms of real estate. You see them in virtually every city: peeling plaster cubes, shabby, dispirited and treeless, stretching in an endless smudge across the horizon. An informal slum replaced by a formal one.

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