In the past, housing societies in Mumbai and Pune have been pulled up for putting a blanket ban on single people, especially students.
In none of India’s big cities is it easy to be a young person on the hunt for a house to rent. Especially if you are single or female, or have the ‘wrong’ surname.
By: Editorial
March 21, 2023 06:50 IST
When a Bengaluru man recently posted on Twitter the demands that a prospective landlord had made before renting him a flat — LinkedIn profile and a “small write-up” about himself — the response his story got fell into two categories. One set of Twitterati expressed great astonishment over the incident, exclaiming about the unreasonableness of landlords. Others sighed in commiseration, sharing their own stories of the peculiar demands of homeowners — NOC from parents, copy of father’s PAN card, letter from a “local guardian” and so on. As one young person ruefully observed, it’s gotten to the point where landlords could demand to see your “janam kundli” and you’d be happy to give it just to be allowed to rent a house or flat.
In the past, housing societies in Mumbai and Pune have been pulled up for putting a blanket ban on single people, especially students. But as more and more young people pour into the job market each year, all looking for accommodation, the experience seems only to have become more widespread and common. In none of India’s big cities is it easy to be a young person on the hunt for a house to rent.
To be sure, there are degrees of difficulty here. Being young and single is worse than just being young, but not as bad as being young, single and female. As depicted in the 2016 documentary Bachelor Girls — its name inspired by the peculiar phrase that exists only in India’s rental property market — young women often have to face a barrage of intrusive questions about whether they have boyfriends and how late they work to demands that their parents live with them or that they sign an agreement that no man will enter the house. Apart, of course, from the problems that come with having the “wrong” surname. Seen in the light of these obstacles, being asked only to share one’s LinkedIn profile may not be the most unreasonable demand a landlord has made.
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