Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India has allowed borrowing of maximum $ 1 billion by means of External Commercial Borrowing to the developers and housing finance companies. Several developers are planning to take advantage of the External Commercial Borrowing for the affordable housing projects in India.ECB windows will give developers an alternate finance option other than the revenue generation from their project sale or funds from the banks etc. The money through ECB will be available at low rates hence it will provoke developers to build affordable housing projects.Arun Kumar Misra from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation said that the last year very few developers were applied due to the time limit. The government has provided a longer time window this year hence better response is expected from the developers. Only four developers have applied till now to raise around $ 100 million.Mantri realty is planning to use the ECB for its Gwalior affordable housing project comprising 1200 flats. VBHC is also planning to use ECB for construction of 18,500 affordable housing units which will be set up on the outskirts of Delhi.Along with Mantri Realty and VBHC, provident is also going to use the funding of ECB to construct 1.5 to 2 million sq ft of low-cost housing project at Hyderabad in addition to its 1.5 million sq ft of already constructed project.National Housing Board (NHB) will keep and Management Information System for monitoring and reporting which will track the end use of borrowed funds by the developers. This decision is taken to make sure that home buyers get the cheaper houses.Many Mumbai based developers have yet not applied for the ECB as they are not in the development of low cost housing like Godrej Properties, Oberoi Realty etc.