UNDP houses, a boon for the quake-hit

By Manas Dasgupta

BHACHAU (KUTCH), MAY 3. The 64-year-old Dhaniben is happy, sleeping in a tent tending her fractured leg she can see her house coming up brick by brick. She also feels more fortunate than most other earthquake-affected people in Kutch district. She will not have to live in a house made of galvanised iron sheets or go through the pangs of moving into a temporary shelter till the permanent structure is ready which could be anything from two to five years.

Instead the houses in Ghodapar village in the middle of the vast salt pans in Bhachau taluka in Kutch district should be ready in about a couple of months time, well before the monsoon, thanks to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) which is constructing model houses in the most backward and remote village inhabitated mostly by the poor salt workers.

What is more, it is also the first time that the villagers can earn more by constructing their own house than they can hope to get in the salt pans because the UNDP pays Rs. 80 per day per head as labour input for helping in constructing the house, nearly double the wage they normally get in the salt pans. It is something they never dreamt of in the past, to get a house and also to get paid for constructing it.

The UNDP is constructing about 1,100 one-room shelters, with provisions to expand the house later, in 26 earthquake affected villages, mostly in the backward areas such as Ghodapar where, as the villagers say, no government official has ever set foot on its land. Each of the structure will be a model house easy to be replicated elsewhere by other non- government organisations or corporate houses adopting the affected villages.

Similarly the people of another remote village, Rajansar, also in the worst-hit Bhachau taluka, were jubilant the other day when the Gujarat Chief Minister, Mr. Keshubhai Patel, laid the foundation stone for a housing project being taken up by the UNDP in co-operation with the Kutch Navnirman Abhiyan, the umbrella organisation of 14 NGOs working in the district.

The construction materials for houses in each village depend on the geographical conditions and soil composition in different areas as the UNDP, guided by Mr. Praveen Singh Pardeshi, who has brought with him the vast experience of constructing houses for the earthquake-affected in Latur, maintain that as far as possible reconstruction programme should use quake-resistant local materials instead of pre-fabricated structures on which the villagers neither repose faith nor develop any sense of belonging.

Mr. Pardeshi, an IAS officer of the Maharashtra cadre, was the district collector of Latur when the town was hit by earthquake in 1993, and is currently on a deputation to the UNDP to help reconstruct houses in Kutch district.

In fact almost every engineer and the masons the UNDP has deployed in its model villages in Kutch to oversee the construction are those who had worked with Mr. Pardeshi in Latur.

The United Nations Resident Co-ordinator and the UNDP resident representative in Delhi, Ms Brenda Gael Mcsweeney, who visited some of the reconstruction sites of her organisation, was touched by the happiness the poor and ignorant villagers expressed is seeing their houses coming up before their eyes and so was the chief minister.

Mr Patel requested Ms Mcsweeney to explore the possibility of the UNDP taking up more villages and to her suggestion agreed to try impress upon other NGOs to replicate the UNDP style of construction.

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