But like a chicken-and-egg syndrome, I don’t think that’s likely to happen unless, ceteris paribus, stamp duties fall like they have in Delhi, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. If stamp duties are looked upon as a service delivered to households to enable their most expensive transaction, which in turn facilitates wealth creation through credit availability and new instruments like reverse mortgages, it should, like brokerage rates in securities transactions, be brought down to levels that match the scale and velocity of such contracts, the net result of which could well be a 1.3 per cent addition to the GDP growth rate, according to McKinsey.

Of course, all these issues — de Soto’s legal, finance ministers’ fiscal, market participants’ transactional, policymakers’ economic, home ministers’ social — need to be resolved simultaneously. But until politics finds a way to work on the rest, let’s learn from the markets and rewrite the transaction cost numbers. If the rising Sensex is a manifestation of lakhs of investor inclusion due to lower costs, it’s about time we replicated the inclusion model for crores of households in property markets and reduced the friction to mass wealth creation. The National Housing and Habitat Policy’s recommended rate: 2-3 per cent; mine: less than 1 per cent; let the debate — and wealth creation — begin.