As cities centralise essential services, rural residents must sell their only means of production — their land — just to buy an urban foothold. Between gruelling office hours and the exhaustion of traffic, modern urban residents have lost control over their most basic resource: time. According to the 2025 India Affordable Housing report, the bottom 60% of urban earners are now structurally excluded from the housing market. In this framework, the freedom promised by urban migration reveals itself as entirely fictitious. Only when we challenge the ‘Urban Illusion’ can we build cities that serve people over profit.

Source: The Telegraph March 26, 2026 07:26 UTC