Most of the people of world's population lives in urban areas i.e. cities and the inflow of humans from rural to urban. So the  urban growth has largely been spawned by economic development initiatives and improved dwelling conditions and has put a tremendous strain on infrastructure of our cities, Indian cities are growing organically and  infrastructure is not able to sustain this rapid growth of population. A new approach towards planning and policy making engaging direct citizen participation along with inclusive urban planning is vital. A coordinated approach is required to prevent imbalanced growth streaming from the competition among cities in trying to attract investment and human capital. So India has prepared 1st to 9th five years plans for this purpose and nicely described their objective, scope  of housing programmed for the poor people. The  urban housing shortage at beginning of Tenth Plan was assessed at 8.890 million units. As much as the 90 % of the shortfall pertained to the urban poor and was attributed to the congestion  needs of joint families, obsolesce and replacement of old houses, upgrading of kutcha houses, and provision of housing to slum-dwellers. The policies of urban development and housing in India have come a long way since 1950s. The pressure of urban population and lack of housing and basic services were very much evident in the early 1950s. In some cities this was compounded by migration of people from Pakistan. However, the general perception of the policy makers was that India is predominantly an agricultural and rural economy and that there are potent dangers of over urbanization which will lead to the drain of resources from the countryside to feed the cities. The positive aspects of cities as engines of economic growth in the context of national economic policies were not much appreciated and, therefore, the problems of urban areas were treated more as welfare problems and sectors of residual investment rather than as issues of national economic importance. More....  

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