Licensing Boost to Affordable Housing in Gurugram

The Haryana government has taken a host of favourable policy measures to boost both demand and supply of affordable housing. Providing fresh impetus to licensing of projects is one major initiative of the state government. Under the revised policy, Haryana government has doubled the area (from 15 acre to 30 acre) earmarked in each of the 118 sectors. In all, 3500 acre area was earmarked for development of affordable housing. The new policy will help ramp up licenses for affordable housing. In a related development, the Deen Dayal Jan Awas Yojana (DDJAY) for high density plotted developments has been expanded to cover Vatsal Valley on Gurgaon-Faridabad Road, allocating 75 acres for residential development. Under this, developers are allowed to come up with plots of the sizes 8– 150 square meters, besides independent floors (4-storey) that can be registered. Further, DDJAY has been made more attractive by revising the licensing norms. These liberalised norms pertain to reducing the minimum area requirement to 5 acres and waiving off the upper limit of 15 acres, subject to 40% net planned area in a sector. This policy boost bodes well for Gurgaon residential realty which has seen major uptick during the fourth quarter of 2020. According to a global property consultancy, affordable housing accounted for 62% of new launches in 2020 in NCR, compared to 47% in 2019. Majority of the new launches were concentrated in Gurgaon. Similarly Gurgaon held the fort in sales, it accounted for 31% of NCR sales, compared to 30% in Greater Noida, another hot affordable housing destination of the NCR. According to a recent report of Knight Frank India, affordability index in NCR (Gurgaon and Noida) sharply fell from 51% to 38% between 2015 and 2020. In this backdrop, the decision of the Gurgaon administration to freeze the circle rates during H2 2020 has helped keep the home prices range-bound. Bringing developing sectors of New Gurgaon under Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG) and under the newly-formed Manesar Municipal Corporation will provide a new momentum to boost civic infra in these sectors, thereby improving their livability quotient. This will turn Gurgaon residential realty much more attractive for both end-users and investors.