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By Nipin Gangadharan It will take a concerted effort to tide over the post-tsunami habitat crisis
 G Radha, a 44-year-old fisherwoman, sits outside her battered home in Nagapattinam, hoping that in the coming months her husband will earn enough to tide over the losses they incurred during the tsunami. “We live in temporary shelters and for the last two months, with the help of some organisations, we have been trying to rebuild this house,” says Radha. “It requires a lot of work and the government has given up on us. I hope in the next couple of months we earn enough to move in permanently. The government has promised us a permanent shelter. But only god knows when it will be ready.”
It may require something close to divine intervention to tide over the post-tsunami habitat problems. Of the 100,000-odd families displaced by the tsunami in south India, over 92% still live in temporary shelters, makeshift tents and public buildings, in rented houses or with relatives. The recent rains have worsened the situation, virtually turning hundreds of tsunami-affected families into a floating population (see box).
Immediately after the catastrophe, the Tamil Nadu government allocated a sum of Rs 40 crore towards building temporary accommodation at the rate of Rs 8,000 per family, for 50,000 families. The government expected provision of another 50,000 temporary shelters by ‘good’ NGOs. The current figures on temporary shelters give details on the construction of only 14,343 shelters by the government, and 18,035 by NGOs, adding up to 32,378 of the initial 100,000 as defined by the government.
These shelters were built by NGOs and contractors with deadlines on their minds rather than the people who were going to inhabit them.
The living conditions inside the shelters barely meet any human habitation standards. The material used for construction is questionable -- tar-coated light-roof sheets, or corrugated metal sheets with plastic tarpaulin or plastic covers on them to make them waterproof. The sites chosen are unsuitable; no attention has been paid to health, hygiene, sanitation, privacy or accessibility to basic needs.
“Most large NGOs do not seem to have considered or questioned government prescriptions/regulations for housing and other relief and rehabilitation work,” says a report of the Housing and Land Rights Network (South Asia Regional Programme).
“Most groups accepted the Tamil Nadu government’s decision to build temporary housing with tar sheeting, even though it was known to be neither durable, waterproof nor heat-resistant. Very few groups suggested alternative, safer housing material,” says the report that’s titled ‘Post-tsunami Relief and Rehabilitation: A Violation of Human Rights’. The problem of overheating, in 42 degree Celsius temperatures, in the temporary shelters -- often derisively called “cowsheds”, “shoeboxes”, or “ovens” -- is well known. An increase in infections, including chickenpox, affected many children. With the lack of adequate medical assistance in the later months, communities spent huge amounts of money on private healthcare, social workers point out. Constructing a new reality Some NGOs have tried to provide spacious, ventilated hygienic units. Temporary shelters built by the Construction Workers Building Centre (CWBC) in Nagapattinam stand out for their innovation and user-friendly nature. The 219 temporary shelters built by the CWBC are attracting a lot of attention due to the care and thought that’s been put into their design and construction. There is a distance of 12 feet between each house, in the row of houses. Each unit has been built on a raised platform to avoid flooding during the rains. The materials used are mud, bamboo, tiles and a little cement. There is a community centre and a playground for children. Each unit of around 175 square feet cost Rs 7,500. The ActionAid-funded CWBC has over 6,000 members in Nagapattinam district alone. The organisation recommends a set of points to consider while building houses: - Involve the community. Don’t go with fixed models. Follow government guidelines, but also take the local community’s expertise and needs into consideration. Remember, panchayats are not always true representatives of the entire community.
- Space is important. These houses are for large families, and working class families have to store gear and equipment in their houses. Generally, the profession decides the design, while differences in the need and size of the family should determine the space.
- Build where people want to live. People have always gravitated towards locations that are best suited for their occupation.
- Transparency in budgeting, planning and design and community participation at all levels is necessary.
- Construction shouldn’t be contracted out to agents. A serious engagement with the community has to be taken up.
- Taluk-level quality committees should be formed to look into the quality of material used and check other discrepancies like commission and graft.
-- R Revathi Most of the shelters, which are located in low-lying areas, were flooded right through the heavy summer rains. There was some respite when tarpaulin sheets were brought in to reduce the leakage, and the sites drained of the floodwater. Grassroots organisations working with these communities underlined the non-availability of adequate drinking water and pathetic sanitation and waste management systems. The situation has worsened with the recent rains and flooding in Tamil Nadu, with some people in temporary shelters forced to move out of their houses for the fifth or sixth time.
The administration, which opposed the use of ‘thatches’ in the initial construction of the temporary shelters, rolled out a shelter improvement programme. Eventually, many shelters were provided thatch or tarpaulin covers. But while the thatch helps the heat problem somewhat, they are still vulnerable to the threat of fire, a reality considering the cooking habits of the community and lack of space between units. Barely 300 metres from the Nagapattinam collectorate, 118 temporary shelters in Pattinchery caught fire on Diwali. Over 1,600 homes in the Kargil Nagar shelters in Chennai were destroyed in a series of fires, forcing residents out into the open once again.
With the onset of the monsoons, emergency NGO meetings were organised by the district administration of almost all the districts. The issues discussed included the availability of clean water, flooding of shelters, damaged shelters and sanitation. But the key issue remained the new interim shelter sites that NGOs were going to take up, not improving the living conditions in existing shelters.
The focus was on building new toilet complexes for each habitation; but no reference was made to the feasibility of the technology in the region and the existing groundwater situation. An international agency working on sanitation commented that water supply to toilets was a state subject; “we only build toilet units”.
In several cases, as in Pudu Nemellikuppam (Kanchipuram district) or Tazhanguda (Cuddalore district), toilets were too narrow, too closely set, and did not provide adequate privacy. In Akkaraipettai (Nagapattinam district), one NGO had built an open-air community toilet. Plastic sheets were used to create a few small bathing areas for women, in the space between two houses, as no bathrooms had been provided for them.
While speaking about permanent housing, the people were emphatic about the unacceptability of common toilets and the need for private toilets for every family. In the Kargil Nagar resettlement colony in north Chennai, which houses over 2,500 families, there was no separate bathing area for women. They were thus forced to bathe inside their tents. “This was a violation of multiple rights, including the right to privacy, water and sanitation,” says a report.
When organisations voiced their demands for improved temporary shelters after the April rains, the government maintained that permanent houses would be built before the monsoons set in, and that there was no need to invest in these shelters.
Though the Emergency Tsunami Reconstruction Project (ETRP) allocated resources for the improvement of infrastructure for temporary shelters, prior to permanent shelters being built, very little has been done about it. So far, the government has invested only Rs 7.63 crore in improving the damaged roofs and walls of 27,318 temporary shelters all over Tamil Nadu, and made specific allocations for improving water and sanitation services in Nagapattinam, Kanyakumari and three sites in Chennai.
The rest of the people are left to rough it out in their temporary shelters. According to Annie George of the NGO Coordination Centre in Nagapattinam, more than 50,000 survivors are still housed in temporary tin-roof shelters in Nagapattinam. She said some of them had moved to their old mud-brick homes near the sea, which had been repaired by NGOs. In Chennai’s Kannagi Nagar, shelters were dismantled as the site was submerged during the November rains. The people were shifted into tenements.
Permanent shelters
The government maintains that it has accurate data on the damage to infrastructure. It announced a housing policy that envisages the construction of “about 130,000” concrete houses at a cost of Rs 1.5 lakh each, and estimates a programme cost of Rs 1,950 crore ($ 445.2 million).
In a joint assessment by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the UN, the recovery cost for Tamil Nadu was put at US$ 868 million. The World Bank Emergency Tsunami Reconstruction Project was signed with a project outlay of Rs 1852.74 crore ($ 423 million) and an expected completion date of 31-10-2007. In the amount allocated for the ETRP, housing construction commanded about 87.5%, as defined by the Environmental and Social Management Framework (ESMF), which works out to around $ 370.13 million for Tamil Nadu.
The latest figures from the government of Tamil Nadu state that out of the 92,231 housing units to be rebuilt, at a cost of 1.5 lakh each, 31,712 houses have been taken up for construction under a public-private partnership scheme by various NGOs and corporate houses. In the same number, 990 houses have been completed and handed over. This means that in actual terms, only 34.38% of houses have been accounted for, and of that only 1.08% have been completed till November.
For the remaining 65.62% of houses, the government is yet to define a policy guideline for their implementation. This is apart from the Rs 75,000 repair assistance to ‘X’ number of damaged houses in the ‘list’ that’s only available with the government and is yet to be disclosed. A floating population For many families, it was the fourth round of displacement. The rains that pounded Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu once again displaced many tsunami-affected people living in temporary shelters. At Eranavur in Thiruvallur district, three clusters of over 1,756 new interim shelters were flooded in the rains. People were hurriedly moved in here, as tents in the Kargil Nagar shelter cluster faced submergence. People in the resettlement in Eranavur, with its brick-and-tile houses, also faced problems during the rains. Over half the houses in one of the three phases of the new settlement were in waist-deep water and people had to be evacuated to tents on higher ground or to their relatives’ houses a few kilometres away. Another phase of 500-odd houses remains marooned in dirty water; toilets with sanitary pits are overflowing and have been rendered useless. Being only an ‘interim’ arrangement, the government has refused to provide sewer lines here. People go to a nearby ground across a railway track to defecate. A woman died a week ago whilst on her way, knocked down by a passing train. The rain has made life extremely difficult here with many men staying away from the sea for several days. Residents complain that there was no food ration or flood compensation in the temporary shelters.
“We complained about the lack of sanitation facilities here, and we were asked to come after 15 days, after the flood relief work elsewhere in the city (was over),” said John Milton, a field worker with the Chennai NGO Karunalaya. Many parts of Chennai suffered inundation due to the heavy rains that plagued the state. The government’s priority was to get the situation under control to prevent a debacle like the Mumbai floods. In the process, people in temporary shelters were left out in the rain. For people in Eranavur, this was their sixth experience of displacement. Soon after the tsunami, several hundred families displaced from the Kasimedu area in coastal Chennai were left out on the streets without any shelter for over two months. They were shifted to the box-like shelters of Kargil Nagar, only to be displaced by the summer rains, and, by June, a massive fire that destroyed whole clusters. Meanwhile, people from the Kannagi Nagar resettlement of largely non-fishing and dalit communities were shifted out to rented houses. The shelters have been dismantled and the site remained under chest-deep water during the first week of December. More than 92,000 permanent homes need to be rebuilt in the state. In Nagapattinam, Ranvir Prasad, additional collector, relief and rehabilitation, said there are 11,000 temporary shelters at 58 locations. “We have to build 17,461 permanent shelters that will spread across 188 km, at 79 locations in more than 70 villages. Only 10 permanent homes have so far been handed over to the tsunami-affected people,” he said. There are 45 NGOs collaborating with the government to build permanent shelters. The government provides land free of cost and the NGOs build the houses. The additional collector claims the construction of 12,700 houses has already begun. For land acquisition alone, the Tamil Nadu government has earmarked Rs 3 crore ($ 6.6 million) in the district of Nagapattinam. Annie George says it will require about Rs 200-Rs 500 to build one permanent shelter, including roads and other civic amenities. Rough estimates, excluding the cost of land, work out to more than Rs 3.5 crore. In an effort to get the design right for the rehabilitation and reconstruction programme, several consultations were carried out to learn from earlier disasters in Gujarat and Maharashtra. The model of ‘community-centric mass housing programmes’ was not felt sufficient to meet the needs of the tsunami-affected. Lessons of implementation deadlines were learnt and fast-track ‘administration-centric’ housing programmes were designed. Token participation was ensured from communities in the form of village reconstruction committees. The first phase of the construction of permanent houses implemented through the PPP (public-private partnership programme) covers a total of 31,712 units. According to the latest figures released by the government, work is yet to begin on more than 22,670 houses. The land needed for the housing programme is around 609 hectares; over 20% of this has still to be acquired. Of the 31,712 allotted houses, the land status of over 5,000 units remains ‘not taken possession’ or ‘not acquired’ or ‘negotiations are in the final stages’. The whole process of land acquisition remains unclear. Several communities are initiating land deals for housing construction, while the government has restricted NGOs from purchasing land and starting construction. These various purchase arrangements have raised questions about the relevance of the policy and its enforcement mechanisms. Most of the sites selected for the permanent shelters are in swampy low-lying areas. In Chinnoor Puthupettai, Cuddalore, the site was in knee-deep water. The government blames this on the non-availability of land, and pins the responsibility of draining or raising the land on the implementing agencies. The absolute lack of participation in design and monitoring mechanisms, and wilful exclusion of communities in the reconstruction programme is also evident. The ETRP covers concepts like community participation to ensure the involvement of affected communities. For example, masons are trained in hazard-resistant construction technologies, etc, but these measures are mere paper tigers. (The author is an environment engineer and a consultant with Swayam Shikshan Prayog) http://www.indiadisasters.org/, December 2005
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