Affordable Rental Housing Typologies for Industrial Workers in the Chakan MIDC Belt, Pune (ARHC)

This M.Arch thesis studies affordable rental housing for industrial workers in the Chakan MIDC belt near Pune, one of Maharashtra's largest automotive and engineering clusters. Thousands of contract and migrant workers live in single rooms rented from local landlords in villages around the industrial estate — often one room shared by four or five people, a common toilet for many rooms, and a long walk or shared-auto ride to the factory gate.

The Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) component of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban was introduced for exactly this group: urban migrants and workers who need rental, not ownership, housing near work. The scheme sets unit types for single-bedroom homes and dormitory beds, but the design of such complexes is left to developers and employers, and typical outcomes are repetitive slab blocks with dark corridors.

The thesis compares four typologies — a four-storey walk-up, a courtyard cluster, an incremental row house and a dormitory-plus-family mix — on a real-scale test site. Each is designed and measured on dwelling units per hectare, carpet area per unit (EWS homes up to 30 m²), daylight and ventilation, open space per person, construction cost per unit, and flexibility for changing households. The tests are run in Revit, Grasshopper and Ladybug, and checked against NBC 2016 and Maharashtra's Unified Development Control and Promotion Regulations (UDCPR) 2020. The preferred typology is developed into a site plan, unit plans and a cluster model for the thesis jury.

Abstract

Industrial workers in Pune's Chakan belt pay a large share of their wages for overcrowded rooms with poor sanitation. Rental housing near workplaces is a stated national policy goal under ARHC, yet there is little design research on which building typology gives the best combination of density, liveability and cost for this group. This thesis designs and compares four typologies on one site, measures them on a common set of indicators, and develops the best-performing one into a detailed housing proposal.

Introduction

The test site is a hypothetical plot on the edge of a village settlement next to the industrial estate, with road access, bus connections to factory gates and a mix of agricultural and newly built land around it. Users include single male workers on contract, young couples, and families with school-going children; household surveys establish their needs, rents paid and daily routines.

Literature and precedent gap

Indian housing design has strong precedents in low-rise, high-density living: Charles Correa's work on incremental housing and "open-to-sky" space, the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore by B. V. Doshi's Vastu-Shilpa, and the incremental "half a good house" model of Alejandro Aravena's Elemental in Chile. These address ownership housing for the urban poor. Rental housing for mobile workers — with dormitories, short tenancies and shared facilities — has a very thin design literature in India. This thesis adapts lessons from ownership precedents to a rental model.

Existing vs proposed approach

• Existing: landlord-built rooms of 9–12 m² in village extensions, shared toilets, no open space, informal rents; or employer hostels in repetitive slab blocks.
• Proposed: a designed rental complex with mixed unit types, internal courtyards, daylight in every habitable room, shared facilities that are genuinely usable (laundry, kitchen, crèche), and a layout that can convert dormitories into family units as demand changes.

Feasibility

• Technical: typologies use load-bearing or simple RCC frame construction with locally available fly-ash blocks, suitable for contractors in the region.
• Regulatory: each typology is checked against UDCPR 2020 provisions for FSI, setbacks, open space and parking, and NBC 2016 Parts 3 and 4.
• Economic: cost per unit and per bed is estimated from current regional schedule-of-rates items, and rents are compared with what surveyed workers already pay.

Workers in the Chakan industrial belt, many of them migrants on short contracts, live in overcrowded rented rooms with shared toilets, little daylight and no open space, and spend significant time and money travelling to work. The ARHC scheme under PMAY-U recognises the need for affordable rental housing near workplaces, but it does not answer the design question of which typology serves these workers best. Developers default to repetitive slab blocks that maximise unit counts but create dark corridors, poor ventilation and no social space.

The problem this thesis addresses is: which housing typology — walk-up, courtyard cluster, incremental row housing or a dormitory–family mix — gives industrial workers in Chakan the best balance of density, liveability, flexibility and affordability, and how should that typology be designed in detail within the ARHC framework, UDCPR 2020 and NBC 2016?

In scope

• Household survey of workers in two or three villages around the industrial estate.
• Four typologies designed at site-plan and unit-plan level on one test site.
• Comparative evaluation on a fixed indicator set.
• Detailed design of the selected typology: site plan 1:500, cluster plans 1:200, unit plans 1:50, sections, and one wall section.

Out of scope

• Detailed structural and services design.
• Financial structuring of a concession under ARHC beyond a rent-versus-cost comparison.
• Land acquisition or ownership questions.
• Construction of prototypes.

The thesis is a comparative typology study followed by design development, run over two semesters.

Methods: document review, structured household survey with consent, measured room drawings, precedent analysis, design-based comparative testing with simulation, cost estimation from regional schedules of rates. All results in the report are the student's own measurements.