Quality of housing in a Himalayan State of India: A Tehsil level analysis

Housing is universally acknowledged as the second most essential human need after food which includes all facilities, equipments, services and devices needed for healthy living. With respect to housing, quality has been described as a measure for the acceptability of the dwelling at a given time and place and in a given set of cultural, technological, and economic conditions. In this paper an attempt has been made to assess the quality of housing in Himachal Pradesh in terms of availability of some selected household amenities. The study is based on secondary data on ‘Household Amenities and Assets’ collected from the Census of India, 2011. Statistical techniques like z-score and composite index have been used to assess the quality of housing. The study brings out that, barring few exceptions, tehsils having higher value of housing quality index are found in the western part of the study area.