However, land is the most politically charged investment in India which is controlled by vested and powerful interests once over a certain threshold. It is not that straightforward. Compared to income , houses are very expensive. FSI is very low in India even with Transit oriented development finally becoming popular now. We may not have US style suburbia , however the GINI coefficient or anything similar calculated for per person area availability to live, is going to be significantly skewed.

For example, in Mumbai average people barely find more than few sq ft to live in whereas families like Godrej control land worth approx 10 b $ in the city itself. Moreover the Godrej family do not want the entire land to be used for development per se and are unwilling to part with some of it for developmental infrastructure projects. The moral of the story is that it is the same (if not worse) as any other country.

The rental yield on houses in India can be as low as 2% (source: Personal) which should in theory lead to crash in housing prices, but that is not happening as population in city will constantly increase with rural to urban migration.

Why would you take a land locked city such as Mumbai for an example? How about Hyderabad or Chennai?

This was all true in US at some point.

Maybe. Even so, AFAICT USA and India are vastly different countries though. I wouldn’t take it for granted that India will develop in exactly the same way that USA did.

This is not true. Large Indian cities have some of the worst planing/zoning/building codes in Asia. Mumbai's FSI (Floor Space Index) is so bad it's almost a meme.

Maybe not NIMBYism, but loads and loads of red tape for land acquisition. Especially since all of the land that is not explicitly for non agricultural use is agricultural, and converting it to non agricultural is a whole process usually involving bribes to 20 different officials. See this blog[1] that was posted to HN a while ago[2]

[1]: https://superr.in/economy/i-tried-starting-a-manufacturing-u...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24106545

Thanks, this is interesting. I wasn't aware that all land that's not explicitly zoned is agricultural.