Indian policies and programmes for housing the urban poor have taken a full circle starting from housing construction in the 1960s, to slum improvement and upgrading through the 1970s and 1980s, to nothing during the 1990s up to mid-2000 and then, since mid-2000, to programmes like Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP) and Integrated Housing and Slum Development Programme (IHSDP), which once again have focused on the construction of housing units. Meanwhile, the estimates of housing shortage in the country are immense. In 2007 the National Urban Housing and Habitat Policy (NUHHP) claimed a housing shortage of 24.7 million housing units in India, out of which 99 per cent was in the EWS and LIG sector. In 2012 a technical group on urban housing shortage for the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17) concluded that the urban housing shortage is nearly 18.78 million out of which 95.6 percent is for EWS and LIG. The reasons for the decrease are not very clear as there was also a methodological difference in the estimation of the two numbers. Even then, 18.78 million shortage is a perturbing number, which will require strong and persistent intervention by the Central and State governments to achieve.