When COVID-19 hit the world in 2020, Akanksha Agarwal had a realisation — not a health-related one, though there was that too. “Working from home showed me two things,” says Agarwal, a 32-year-old banker in a prominent private sector bank in Delhi. “The first is that I needed a house that allowed me to work from home, and the second is that working from home itself had led me to accumulate quite a lot of savings.”

She hoped to deploy these savings in a few years to buy a house, if not in Delhi itself, then in Gurugram, Delhi’s corporate suburb in Haryana; or even Noida, another extension of the National Capital Region, in Uttar Pradesh. When the time came in 2024, and she had accumulated enough to make a down payment on what had been a ₹1.8 crore house she had been eyeing in Gurugram’s Sector 24, she found that she was woefully short of what was required. The price was now ₹3.2 crore, a 77.8% increase.

Agarwal says her salary has gone up by an average of 10-12% every year for the last several years. “That’s the standard hike in the banking sector. But the thing is, even my friends in other cities have been saying that houses have just become unaffordable. This was the story everywhere,” Agarwal laments.

The “everywhere” nature of her story extends across eight major real estate markets in India: Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad. In these cities, the price rise in housing has outstripped the growth in salaries.

A dream out of reach

The Housing Price Index, developed jointly by the real estate brokering firm Housing.com and the Srini