However, they also give rise to practices of social exclusion thereby imparting poor citizenship education to their residents. One of the ways through which gated communities practise exclusion and discrimination is by denying rental housing to a significant section of our citizenry, including Muslims, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, OBCs, North-Eastern States’ residents, sexual minorities, bachelors and single women.

Unfavourable Market

The National Urban Housing and Habitat Policy, 2007, was formulated with the primary aim of ‘Affordable Housing for All’ emphasising the ST, SC, minorities, backward classes and the urban poor. Section 7 (7.2.1.3) of the National Urban Housing Policy, 2015, discusses ‘Need-Based Rental Housing’ (short/mid/long term basis) for specific target groups such as migrant labour, single women, single men, students and any other target group as defined by the state who have the ability to pay only up to a certain amount of monthly rent in accordance with the National Building Code (NBC). However, the lived experiences of women in Indian cities suggest otherwise.

The rental housing market is particularly unfavourable to single women. Most of the Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) and cooperative housing societies in Indian cities have discriminatory housing rules and policies that inhibit and check the inhabitation, mobility and freedom of women. Single women are often denied rental housing in middle-class housing complexes by cooperative housing societies and RWAs due to their marital status. They have stated and unstated policies regarding not letting out flats to single women. Even when the flats are rented out, sometimes house owners insist on signing the rent agreement not with the female tenant but with a male guardian. Often, there is a clause in rent agreements prohibiting visits from the “opposite gender”.

There are other stated conditionalities like not having any night outs, time curfews etc. Apart from such formal controls, single women also have to put up with informal and moral policing including scrutiny of their private lives and personal space, and unwanted neighbourhood gaze. There is a great deal of interest in their personal lives, including the clothes they wear and the kind of makeup they put on, their social circle, their car parking skills, whether they consume alcohol, whether they are having house parties and getting male visitors and so on. Time and again, they are inundated with unsolicited bits of advice from the RWA office bearers as well as the other residents. Such policing measures and voyeuristic scrutiny are an understood and accepted fact in these housing societies.

Regressive Idea

It is interesting to note that one’s identity, specifically the marital status of a woman, decides the course of accessibility to spaces such as housing and other facilities even when one has the required financial resources to afford that space but does not qualify because the check box of the socially accepted norm of eligibility is not complete (Bhargava, R, Chilana, R 2020). This does not come as a surprise when we know the value and importance of one’s marital status taking precedence over the presence of multiple other support systems in their life.

The regressive idea of women being ‘incomplete’ without a cisgender male gets manifested in public spaces and evidently thrives in the current times. Thus, being an unmarried single woman in Indian cities is one of the most prevalent social stigmas that the said category has to deal with daily. The popular idea of singlehood, particularly with women, is romanticised and viewed from a lens of a ‘progressive’ radical move in the patriarchal society. However, it conveniently overlooks the socio-cultural and political-economic contexts behind women’s lives. The decisions on singlehood are bound by multiple factors.

Patriarchal Values

Furthermore, the realities of caste, class, ethnicity and minority status add layers to the already complex idea of singlehood for women. In contemporary societies, a substantial proportion of adult individuals are single (Pew Survey), ie, they are not involved in any romantic relationship. An article in The New York Times titled ‘No Visitors, No Drinking, Home by 9: Renting as a Single Women in India’ has detailed lived experiences of women and their struggle to find a place to call home. For women in India, complex socio-cultural and political economic-contexts are foundational to their lives and decisions, and remaining unmarried is often an unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities (Lamb, S 2022).

On the other hand, social mentalities and practices within the urban enclaves are mostly oriented towards maintaining homogeneity and order. Affluent middle-class residents continually worry about disruptions to their ordered ‘aesthetics’ as a ‘security threat’. This is why, most RWAs have absurd rules and regulations which celebrate and promote conservative and patriarchal values. However, this also creates a culturally self-contained world that allows for little diversity and pluralism and deprives the residents of a multicultural and diverse social world. Most importantly, it leads to poor citizenship education.

Thus, it is pertinent that identified barriers to accessing rental housing such as caste, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and marital status are removed to meet the goals of the National Urban Housing and Habitat Policy, 2007, and the National Urban Housing Policy, 2015.

Additionally, since the singlehood of women is a stigma manifesting itself in discrimination in rental housing (Bhargava, R, Chilana, R 2020), it must be seen as one of the major barriers to accessing rental housing. To address this, we need concerted efforts not just at the level of policy. We also need to create awareness of this issue through social campaigns and the use of media and encourage different forms of civic action, including dialogue with stakeholders such as RWAs and cooperative housing societies. This will help in making the rental housing market inclusive and accessible to different sections of society, including single women.

Prof. Anup Tripathi, Faculty of Sociology, FLAME University and Prof. Moitrayee Das, Faculty of Psychology, FLAME University have co-authored this opinion piece.