Not everything is rosy anywhere in the world. One can find issues with any positive story. I would rather have expensive real estate problem due to high paying jobs than poverty.

During my dad's time, it was much easier to buy a house on a modest salary. And the houses were well built too. These days, it is near impossible to buy a house unless you are a very high earner, as all available real estate is being gobbled up by "investors", aka, who have high paying jobs (mostly software).

It is good that we are elevating people from poverty. All I am saying is it creates a different set of problems. But yeah, overall it is good that we are able to pull more people up from poverty.

Buy an acre of land in a remote location and build a house? Programming is a remote job, you have to enjoy it. That's my plan anyway.

Just live on rent. It will be far cheaper and flexible in India. The rent won't even pay the EMI for home loans for vast majority of these land lords in metros.

Real estate will get more expensive due to political greed than any other kind of development. The supply of real estate is artificially constrained by the political class, so any kind of development (say hypothetically manufacturing instead of software) will make it expensive. There used to be a time when new land for building houses was frequently sold by the government in the form of new "colonies", but that has completely stopped. The local political greed (municipal corporators, mayors, MLAs) has destroyed most Indian cities due to lack of planning, and this small fish only cares about short term money they can make.

What you are describing is one part of the problem.

I have friends who earn in dollars. They can easily afford to buy a couple of apartments every year. They do this and let those apartments sit vacant for a few years, waiting for them to appreciate. When many people start doing this, it artificially inflates the prices.

Sounds like a job for Georgism (if you are up for radical economic transformation) or a vacancy tax

That can be solved with tax/other laws. Guess who will be most impacted by those laws? Not people with one or two apartments as much, but those who do in large scale - that is again politicians and their helpers who help launder illegal money this way. If there are loopholes in the law, people will abuse it but we have to realize the loopholes are not meant for the layperson but the powerful few who abuse it at much higher scale.

It doesn't work that well in practice. While real estate is overinflated for buying, rental yields reflect the market. They are under 2-4% of the property value in most places.

India is also expanding vertically in cities so new housing is often built in different area and older infrastructure is not maintained in the long run.

A significant portion of real estate is built on under the table money. You often pay 30-50% of the value in black money.

So, real estate is a very illiquid investment unless commercial in India.

There are also cultural reasons for artificially inflating real estate and Indian property developers are under huge loans similar to China. It won't be sustainable.

"Everybody works but the vacant lot"

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_bu...

A big reason why Gurgaon real estate is more expensive than Bangalore despite having way more land and poorer jobs is government corruption. All those bribes and backroom deals get siphoned off to buy apartments and land. These buyers can hold forever because their cost basis is practically 0.

I’m actively hunting for an apartment in NCR and get painfully reminded of how poor I actually am.

There was a time when we were living in Delhi and we used to drive down to Jaipur, where our extended family was. We kids looked forward to the drive, as it meant nice stopovers, snacks, etc.

After leaving Delhi we would , after an hour or so, make our first stopover in a little village called .... Gurgaon! There we would have chai, samosas, etc. In those days Gurgaon was separated from Delhi and a sleepy little village.

When the capital expanded, those villagers became instant millionaires.

A lot of comments in this thread are crediting TCS, Infosys, etc for lifting people out of poverty, but another factor was the skyrocketing realestate prices. Small-time farmers who could barely make ends meet suddenly were sitting on million-dollar land holdings.

How much of this has to do with credit expansion and how much from cash purchases of those properties?

(Though I suppose an urban software developer is a good credit risk)

I visited NCR for first time recently and found that although the metro is amazing, NCR still remains a large urban sprawl whose land potential has not been utilized properly. With continually developing infrastructure on more metro, RRTS etc. hopefully the land utilization also improves.

India’s physical infrastructure has honestly fallen way, way behind our digital infrastructure.

Absurd that I can go a month in India without ever using cash or cards, order everything I want from anywhere and have it delivered within a day (or even minutes), yet it can sometimes take me 45 minutes to travel 3k and that my car’s suspension breaks down at 50k kilometers because there is no public transport and the roads are filled with sinkhole sized potholes.

India's going on a massive metro rail spree and also massively improving intercity rail. Things are significantly improving, though there will always be traffic in a city the size of Delhi or Mumbai.

Eh, that has been ongoing forever. Most projects are grossly delayed and over budget. Not a single metro outside of Delhi has any appreciably large metro rail system. Many have been in development for a decade. Projects get routinely stuck in political gridlock or because the builder went bankrupt.

The Bangalore metro project started in 2011. In over a decade, they've managed a paltry 56km of active rail lines - an average of 5km/year. Meanwhile, the city hasn't even had a master plan since 2016 and every government department works on its own without any collaboration whatsoever (resulting in disasters such as railway stations without any proper bus connectivity).

India's bureaucracy and polity will keep holding our infrastructure hostage.

5km per year is higher than any European or North/South American city (except maybe Moscow), I believe.

What car are u using that its suspension broke at 50k, our old family car of 15 years never had once broken, an believe me it was used a lot on Indian village roads.

Real estate is not super expensive in Bangalore - It is expensive in Mumbai though