THE BIGGEST ENEMY OF RESPECTABLE HOUSING FOR THE POOR IN RURAL AREAS OF UTTRAKHAND

 

THE BIGGEST ENEMY OF RESPECTABLE HOUSING FOR THE POOR IN RURAL AREAS OF UTTRAKHAND

Last time I had written about the state of housing for the poor in the urban areas. Let us look at the state of affairs in the Rural Areas.

The entire machinery of the state related to housing and building materials is completely oblivious to the problems of the poor and their shelter related problems in the rural areas especially in the hills and the foothills.

In the rural areas the issues of land are less problematic and the issue of availability of materials and water and skilled manpower are more important. The design is done with collective knowledge and traditional wisdom.

The building materials policy of the state of Uttrakhand seems to have been written by the truck operators and the building material suppliers of Haldwani and Rishikesh. They have been helped by the armchair environmentalists of Dehradun and Delhi.

It is the assumption of these armchair environmentalists and the government that the biggest enemies of the environment are the native people of the state. If you allow them to have their way they will plunder the forests and damage the `fragile’ ecosystem of the Himalayas.  (Sadly they only have the Himalayas, where else should the villagers look for their needs).

I can debate this assumption of this government but let’s agree for some time and go to the next part of the argument. The people do not deserve to get anything Free, but the people should be able to buy things which are produced in the state in abundance.

The whole world is patting the backs of builders who use local building materials by giving them green credits. The new `modern’ are  Green buildings which do not require materials to be brought from far off and use those materials which does not consume large amounts of fossil fuels in production and Transport.  The Three big items which are the worst in this list are `BRICKS, CEMENT AND STEEL. Besides not being `green’ these materials are seriously expensive for the rural folk. The Policy for housing in the hills is a cruel joke on the poor.

The government is convinced that the best materials for construction in the hills are `BRICKS, CEMENT AND STEEL.

ALL LOCAL MATERIALS ARE DISALLOWED OR BANNED. And I Repeat

ALL LOCAL MATERIALS ARE BANNED

People when they build themselves use their own hands and sometimes some local masons. These people have skills in using mud, stone with mud mortar, timber, slate, thatch, bamboo, etc.

The picking of all these materials in the state is BANNED. They are allowed to be used only if they are either illegally procured OR bought from a Mafia of Suppliers.

MUD

It is not allowed to dig a pit in a land not owned by you to bring home some mud to build a wall. It is not allowed to buy the mud from some one if he is willing to dig a pit in his land to sell to you under the mining rules. I am obviously talking of two truck loads of mud and not a basket load.

THATCH

The poorest of the poor in the foothills, places like Ramnagar, Kashipur etc build houses with Thatch Roofs and they bring the grass which grows along the water channels on Government land. A few years ago the Government has given the harvesting of this grass to contractors so the poorest have to buy grass for making thatch roofs. Cutting of Tall grass for building your own roof is disallowed.

STONE

It is not allowed to bring stone from a land not owned by you. You cannot pick from the floor of the forest under the forest rules. You cannot quarry stone unless you go through a winding process in the local collectorate. There are very very few government approved quarries in the hill districts, which are allowed to quarry stone to sell.

In the box below is a separate piece on the business of stone and quarrying in the hills.

Imagine five little hillocks each say 200 meters wide at the base and 60 meters high. The entire Himalayan belt is made up of hillocks. Suppose we dig up hillock no. 4 the area of which is 10 acres at the base and dig it so much that it becomes a lake 20 m deep. Do you know what amount of stone will come out of it. In my view some 10, 50,000 cum or some 1, 75, 000 trucks of stone will come out. A small house may need maybe 10 trucks, if it is built from scratch.

If the stone is semi dressed at the quarry it will generate some 20% volume of usable aggregate. With semi dressed stone it is possible to build thinner walls also. This semi dressed stone has a market in the plains as premium stone. Any way hundreds of trucks bringing cement and steel are going back empty. This can bring in revenue for the state apart from giving employment to a large no. of people. A new skill of expert masons can be developed too.

Why is the land area in the Uttrakhand like a holy cow and the environment of the whole country depends on it. We are talking of a size of 3 football fields (hell I didn’t think of it earlier. we can make some flat grounds for our children to play on) in two places in each district. Some 6 hectares in each district far from human habitation.  If the leopard doesn’t walk there any more or the birds can’t make a nest in the shrubs on this 4 hectares so be it. Once it becomes a lake other organisms will come. It may even become useful in other ways. This 3 hectares (78 hectares if made in two places in each of the 13 districts) is much less than the 270 hectares given to JP group for the F1 Track. Incidentally environmentally speaking the area under F1 track or Mayawati’s monuments and under thermal/ hydel power plants becomes a complete ruin. The area under mining in states like Rajasthan and MP is in hundreds of square kilometers and not in mere hectares. (I sq km =100 hectares)

The reason why such a proposal has never come up is because it is a felt need of the poor people and not the political class. Provisioning of all these materials is a daily battle of the poor people.

Families where the bread earner works outside and brings the cash once a year, they buy materials in installments sometimes over years in order to build a house. 2000 bricks bought in sep 2008, 500 kg steel bought in aug 2009, cement and aggregate bought in july 2010, extension to the house built in the holidays in November 2010. plastering pending till the next time the poor `fauji’ can get some money and `chutti’.

The entire picture of construction in the hills will change if stone and timber is made freely available to the people of the state. Our entire traditional construction will come back to life. Villages will start to get the benefit of peoples own creative skills. Our state will start to have resorts and hotels built with stone and timber rather than the ugly cement and concrete. Public buildings will look like hill constructions and not like something imported from Haryana or UP. The state can have its brand of stone available for cladding in homes in Delhi and Punjab and Haryana. Many people can get employment close to their homes in these quarries. (alternatively the state could at its own discretion disallow export to keep quarrying in check.

The new picture will have four hillocks and one lake surrounded by these four hillocks. Nothing else has to change.

SLATE

Quarrying of slate is banned. Period. The fact that it provided and still provides a viable local roof cladding material is some old village tale for the policy makers. Obviously the villager is forced to think that this policy maker is not one of their own.

There is a need for a full scale debate on the environmental impact of mining in the hill states like Uttrakhand. Mining of soap stone is good, pyrites and phosphates is good, mining of RBM in some pockets is good, mining of Lime stone is acceptable, Blasting for making miles of roads is okay, mining and blasting for making dams and hydel projects is good but mining for the provisioning of stone for construction of poor peoples housing is MURDER.

TIMBER

Too much has been said about timber. The government has a monopoly over timber production. All of it belongs to them. If you sow a tree in your own house compound so that your son may get some timber 30 years later to make some doors and windows, you cannot cut it without permission from the government. If some timber tree happens to grow on your land you are not allowed to cut it. They belong to the government.

If the government has monopoly over the timber then it should cut the trees scientifically and then sell it so that people can buy it.  Entire armies of forest department protect the forests from fire, from the local people and the unscrupulous elements, but when it comes to utilizing what they have saved, the record is poor.

There is a `Van Nigam’ (Forest Corporation) to manage the forest produce. It is not very decentralized, it has no saw mills, it owns no seasoning, sizing, or treatment plant except a defunct one at Rishikesh.

Mostly Van Nigam sells. It sells marked trees in a forest, sometimes it sells `lots’ of round logs, sometimes it sells uncut, unseasoned logs piece by piece. It leaves out jobs which can only be done by a corporation and not by a trader.(sawing, seasoning, utilizing timber waste at a large scale, making products from wood waste such as briquettes, making industrial products from good timber such as impregnated board, dip-anti-termite treatment etc.  It does the job which can be done by any small trader. These jobs are measuring, marking, making inventory, deciding prices and selling round logs.

The Van Nigam serves itself, it gives the government some money, it pays the salary of its employees, it auctions timbers to traders, it does not do any thing useful for the people directly.

Some powerful armchair environmentalists have banned all felling in the pine forests in Uttrakhand. These forests have become too dense and dangerous from the point of view of managing of fires. Let us cut pine trees and make useful timber and make it available at the district Tehsil Level for a fair price. People will return to making houses with Timber.  It is now an accepted Fact that `WOOD IS THE GREENEST BUILDING MATERIAL’

SAND AND GRIT

In the mountains there exist some pockets where the strata have been completely fractured due to some geological activity. It is commonly called a `bajri ka pahaad’ . the quarrying is banned. The picking of sand, grit  and stone from river beds except in specified `lots’ in the foothills. No such thing in the upper reaches. The only way to get it is illegally or to transport it in trucks from …..No surprise in this Haldwani and Rishikesh.

It is allowed to pick stone from the river beds for a price in the foothills (it actually benefits the environment by deepening the rivers, and prevents flooding). 

Some misplaced idea of environmental protection stopped the picking up of such materials for nearly three years in Uttrakhand. The government did not follow up the cases in the courts to get mining in the rivers restarted. The truckers of Himachal and Uttar Pradesh which are just across the border made huge amounts of money possibly in connivance with the politicians of Uttrakhand. 

Now this material is available again in the foothills of the Himalayas. The so called environment has been `saved’ for three years in Uttrakhand but it has been `used’ (dug up) just across the border. You have to see to believe the vast hole almost one km wide and ten or more k.m. long  that has been made in Sunderpur just across Mohand , by removing River bed materials which have been exported to Dehradun and beyond.

GOVERNMENTS ACTIONS

The government occasionally makes noises about the importance of using local materials, the use of Earth quake safe technologies etc but spends money only in advertising or in holding seminars for the bored, already overloaded engineers for all departments of the state.

If you want to build a house in Karan Prayag or another equally remote place

1. you cannot buy legal timber in the town
2. you cannot buy local stone for a price and a legal cash memo
3. you cannot buy local sand or grit
4. you cannot get legal or illegal slate even for a price in town
5. you cannot quarry mud from the forest

But you can buy

1. Sand,
2. grit from Rishikesh,
3. steel,
4. cement and
5. third rate bricks from Muzaffarnagar specially made undersized for the hills. (so more bricks can be carried in a small truck, consumer be damned).

The reader can decide who the biggest enemy of respectable housing for the poor in the rural areas is.

 

Param Jigyasu

You can e mail the author at paramjigyasu7@gmail.com or view this at his blog paramjigyasu7.blogspot.com