Vivek Kaul: Real estate, data, stories, and stories that sound like data
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I don’t feel like writing this piece. I am feeling bored and Mumbai’s famous October heat is here.
Even with the AC on, the room I am writing in feels hot. I lower the AC’s temperature. It still feels hot.
Maybe it’s time to get the AC cleaned. The smog is also back. You can’t see Worli-Lower Parel skyline from the Bandra end of the sealink.
The glorious and very Instagrammable blue sky has suddenly gone missing. I feel like I am in Delhi already even before it is Diwali. And that’s not a happy feeling.
Guess, I am blabbering here. Maybe I am. In fact, I have just finished reading a very interesting piece by the economist Ajay Shah in the Business Standard newspaper.
In this piece Shah writes: “If we generously assume each individual uses 100 square metres totally (across residential and commercial), the land required for the full population of 1.4 billion people is 4.2 per cent of the Indian land area." In fact, he had written something similar in a piece he wrote for The Economic Times in May 2013, in which he had said: “If you place 1.2 billion people in four-person homes of 1,000 square feet each, and two workers of the family into office/factory space of 400 square feet, this requires roughly 1% of India's land area assuming an FSI of 1. There is absolutely no shortage of land to house the great Indian population." (That’s a cumulative advantage for you, or the trouble of remembering random things you end up reading.) The point that Shah is making is that India has enough space to house its millions. So, the argument around India’s huge population driving up housing prices doesn’t really work.
Read more on livemint.com
