Housing is often treated as a question of infrastructure, welfare, or urban policy. Yet housing is also deeply connected with human dignity, equality, health, privacy, livelihood, and participation in social life. The legal recognition of housing rights therefore raises a broader constitutional question: what does it mean for the State to secure a dignified life when access to adequate housing remains deeply unequal?

In India, the Constitution does not expressly enumerate a standalone fundamental right to housing. However, the expansion of Article 21 has enabled the judiciary to recognise various conditions necessary for a life with dignity, including the importance of shelter and housing.

This judicial development has contributed significantly to the constitutional discourse on housing. At the same time, recognition of a right does not automatically guarantee its effective realisation.

The more difficult questions arise at the point of implementation.

What constitutes adequate housing?

When can an eviction be constitutionally justified?

What procedural safeguards should apply before people are displaced?

How should courts balance housing rights with urban development, infrastructure projects and competing public interests?

And, perhaps most importantly, what positive obligations should the State bear when individuals and communities lack access to adequate housing?

These questions become particularly significant in the context of rapid urbanisation. Informal settlements, insecure tenure, displacement and redevelopment demonstrate that housing insecurity is not simply a matter of individual deprivation. It is also shaped by planning decisions, administrative practices, land governance and the distribution of public resources.

A meaningful right to housing therefore requires more than a declaration that housing is connected to the right to life. It requires attention to the substance, scope and enforceability of that right.

International human rights law provides an additional framework through which concepts such as adequate housing, security of tenure, affordability, habitability, accessibility and protection against forced eviction can be examined. The challenge is to understand how these principles can interact with India's constitutional framework without overlooking the institutional and resource constraints involved in their implementation.

The central concern of this research is therefore the gap between constitutional recognition and lived entitlement.