Too Informal to Adapt
In the middle of a heat wave, a tin roof is more of an amplifier than a shelter. Temperatures inside informal settlement households with metal or asbestos roofing routinely run 8 to 12 degrees above ambient, meaning that when Nagpur's streets hit 47°C, the interior of an informal settlement hits something closer to 55°C. Weeks later, the same roof that practically cooked its residents channels floodwater through walls that were never designed to hold it.
This is not a sequence of disasters but rather a continuous condition, cycling through seasons, compounding with each passing year. The residents, especially pregnant women and children, living inside are among the most climate-exposed urban populations in the world. They are also, by design, outside the reach of the major schemes that India has built to protect them.
Built to Last, Left Behind
Informal settlements are home to a diverse population of the urban poor, primarily those categorised as Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and Low-Income Groups (LIG). While India’s 2011 Census counted such informal residents at nearly 65 million, the recent estimates suggest the number today is significantly higher, likely exceeding 100 million.
The climate exposure of these residents operates as a compound layering of physical, geographical, and legal precariousness. Over 60% of urban informal roofs are built from galvanised metal, asbestos, or thin concrete. These materials absorb solar heat, driving indoor temperatures several degrees above the surroundings, thereby trapping residents in a state of chronic thermal exhaustion with neither the cooling infrastructure nor the financial means to escape it.
Below these roofs, the land compounds the risk. Informal settlements mostly come up on the suburbs where even moderate rainfall can produce waterlogging that can persist for days on end, destroying fragile structures and spreading waterborne diseases through areas that formal drainage infrastructure seldom reaches.
Underlying both of these layers is a legal condition that makes the other two permanent: without secure land tenure, residents face a constant eviction threat that suppresses any incentive to invest in structural upgradation. This self-reinforcing condition makes informal residents the most climate-exposed urban population in India.
This convergence of processes creates a "cycle of vulnerability" where the urban poor are not only more exposed to climate hazards but are also deprived of the tools and security needed to adapt. Residents have to repeatedly spend a fraction of their income just for basic repairs, yet they remain trapped in a state of high risk due to these materials being cheap and of low quality. Establishing this scale and intensity of lived experience is essential to understanding the urgent need for locally grounded, community-based adaptation.
The Tenure Gate
India's urban development programmes embed a "tenure-first" approach that makes formal land ownership a prerequisite for housing and infrastructure assistance, excluding informal settlements from the ambit of climate adaptation.
Under PMAY-U 2.0, the verticals require proof of legal land ownership or encumbrance-free land before projects or funding can be approved. Ownership documents and clear land titles are some of the prerequisites to become a beneficiary of this scheme.
AMRUT 2.0 reinforces the exclusion by linking municipal funding to property tax and user charge reforms. It has been found in the Global South that since informal settlements are typically outside the property tax system, extending infrastructure to these areas may reduce municipal revenue performance, creating incentives for cities to prioritise formally recognised neighbourhoods.
International climate finance institutions, including the Green Climate Fund (GCF), complement these constraints by requiring projects to align with national legal and institutional frameworks. As a result, funding is channelled towards legally titled, low-risk projects rather than the climate-vulnerable informal settlements.
Consequently, the state's "tenure-first" sequencing delays essential adaptation until land regularisation is complete, and this process often takes decades. By making legal title a prerequisite for basic housing and services, current policies exclude the communities most exposed to climate risks, despite the urgency of immediate adaptation.
Replacement as Revealed Preference
India's housing-climate policy history shows a deliberate political choice to deprioritise in-situ upgrading in favour of redevelopment and replacement. Successful community-led models show that security of tenure is better understood as a continuum where de facto security, collective action, and precedent-setting projects can effectively catalyse resilient upgrading.
Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) prioritised in-situ development, mandating states to provide 15-year renewable lease rights to catalyse upgrading. When PMAY-U replaced RAY, this rights-based focus was quietly deprioritised for an asset-based model. PMAY-U’s In-situ vertical (ISSR) shifted toward private developer participation using land as a resource, often ignoring settlements on low-value land. Crucially, the procedural infrastructure underwent a complete reversal: where RAY aimed to grant tenure through the act of upgrading, PMAY-U verticals now demand clear land title or ownership proof as a prerequisite for any structural assistance. This departure from a slum-centric approach toward a tenure-first requirement effectively builds a procedural wall that excludes the landless poor from immediate climate adaptation investments.
The work of the Indian Alliance, including SPARC, NSDF, and Mahila Milan, in Pune and Mumbai offers the most domestically grounded evidence. Rather than waiting for a formal title to unlock investment, the Alliance used community-managed revolving funds to finance housing and sanitation projects first, demonstrating that physical stability could generate legal stability rather than the other way around. In Pune's BSUP pilot, 1200 families were rehabilitated into upgraded housing, with the Municipal Corporation granting 99-year tenancy leases as a direct consequence of the reconstruction process, tenure thereby arriving as an outcome. In Mumbai, the Alliance's construction arm, SSNS, deployed Transferable Development Rights (TDR) as a market subsidy mechanism, absorbing the financing risk that formal banks refused to touch precisely because residents only obtained tenure at the end of the construction cycle.
Thailand's Baan Mankong programme offers the sharpest international counter-model because it stopped treating tenure insecurity as a prerequisite for action. Communities begin the process while still living without legal security on public or private land, mapping settlements, linking into city-wide networks, and entering collective negotiation with landowners and municipal authorities, all done simultaneously. The programme works through communal tenure arrangements, including land-sharing agreements, long-term collective leases, and land swaps negotiated locally depending on what each site makes possible.
The argument that informal settlements should be replaced with formal housing risks overlooking decades of policy failure and the urgency of the looming climate risks. Despite years of clearance and relocation efforts, informal settlements continue to expand. Large-scale replacement remains constrained by limited public funding, high costs, project delays, and the persistence of informality even after relocation.
Meanwhile, these residents face immediate and life-threatening climate hazards, particularly extreme heat, which poses serious risks of heatstroke, respiratory illness, and other health impacts. Scientific evidence also indicates limits to human heat tolerance, making prolonged exposure dangerous.
Meeting Cities Where They Are
Here is what dismantling the filter actually requires, and it is not complicated.
A tenure-inclusive retrofit architecture should replace the current "tenure-first" approach with a continuum of tenure models that prioritises immediate climate resilience while recognising a range of tenure arrangements. Rather than making legal ownership a prerequisite for investment, adaptation should be linked to occupancy and community security.
This is achievable through collective tenure mechanisms such as community land trusts, housing cooperatives, long-term group leases, and Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA)-type models, which reduce displacement risks and enable investment without requiring individual land titles. Community-managed financing models, including revolving funds, wholesale group loans, and first-loss guarantees, can bypass conventional collateral requirements by relying on collective savings and institutional support.
A redesigned PMAY-U should permit incremental in-situ retrofits, such as cool roofs, improved ventilation, green infrastructure, and raised platforms, and recover costs through community-managed user charges or rental revenues rather than asset-based foreclosure. This would shift assistance from ownership-based eligibility to household occupancy.
The need is especially urgent for rapidly urbanising Tier-2 cities of India where informal settlements are still expanding. Introducing tenure-inclusive retrofit frameworks will offer an opportunity to avoid replicating the exclusionary and climate-vulnerable urban patterns seen in the larger metropolitan cities of the country.
India has spent decades treating informality as a transitional condition, a problem that would resolve itself if enough new housing were built, enough titles were issued, enough redevelopment projects were sanctioned. However, climate change has no patience for that timeline. The households living in informal settlements are not waiting to become formally legible before they are exposed to heat, flooding, and structural failure; they are exposed now, compoundingly, in every monsoon and every summer that grows hotter than the last.
The Tier-2 cities that are still taking shape have one advantage Mumbai and Delhi no longer have: the choices are yet to harden.
Written By: Ritika Singh Thakur Edited By: Nilanjan Jha
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