11 years of full salary to buy one flat, is owning a home just a dream now?

Let that sink in for a moment. An average Indian needs 11 years of their entire salary, every single rupee, just to buy a basic flat. Not a luxury apartment, not a villa, a basic flat. And in Mumbai or Delhi? Forget it. You need 20 to 30 years of full income. That means if you start earning at 25, you would need to work until 55 without spending a single rupee on food, rent, clothes, or anything else. How is that even possible? The price of homes has grown way faster than salaries. Property prices in major Indian cities have jumped 3 to 4 times in the last 10 years, but salaries have barely moved. The Economic Survey itself admitted real wage growth has been just 0.4 percent in a decade. So houses got 4 times more expensive but your salary stayed the same. What kind of math is that? Builders keep launching new projects with luxury tags and inflated prices that nobody can afford. In Mumbai alone, over 5 lakh homes are sitting empty because they are priced way beyond what 90 percent of people can pay. But instead of reducing prices, builders just wait for investors to buy them. And the govt? They offer tax benefits on home loans. Great, so you save a few thousand on tax while paying Rs 80,000 per month EMI for 20 years. That does not make homes affordable, it just makes the loan slightly less painful. Home loans eat up 40 to 50 percent of monthly income for most middle class families. After paying EMI, rent for current place, groceries, school fees, healthcare, and commute, there is literally nothing left. One medical emergency and the whole budget collapses. And the crazy part is rents are also climbing fast. So neither buying nor renting feels manageable anymore. You are trapped either way. Some people say buy in outskirts or tier 2 cities. But those areas have no jobs, no infrastructure, no hospitals, and no schools. What is the point of owning a house 50 km from your office when the commute takes 3 hours each way? The RBI has warned about housing bubbles multiple times. Property in Indian cities is significantly overvalued compared to income levels, way above the global average. In developed countries, a home costs 4 to 6 times annual income. In India, it is 11 times nationally and 20 to 30 times in metros. That is not a healthy real estate market, that is a crisis. The govt talks about Housing for All but their own schemes like PMAY barely scratch the surface. The subsidy amount is too small for metro cities where the actual problem is. And land prices keep going up because of speculative buying and lack of land regulation. Has owning a home in India become an impossible dream for the middle class?