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 Se

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