How not to manage disaster relief

Victims of last year’s flash floods in Leh have abandoned the costly prefabricated rooms they were provided as disaster relief under CSR schemes. Their breath turned to ice in them. They have begun to rebuild their mud homes which insulate them against the extreme cold.
Pasang Dolma gave birth to a daughter on August 5 last year, the day of the cloudburst over Leh in Ladakh that led to flash floods. She lost her two-room mud house and was forced to stay in a tent until the district administration gave her a prefabricated room in November.
Pasang Dolma did not stay in the room for more than a month. Stanzin Dolkar, her four-month-old daughter, developed chest congestion due to the cold. “The room was so cold that our breath condensed to become icicles in the morning. Even with a bukhari one would wake up cold in the damp blankets. My husband and I decided to rebuild our mud house even though the harsh winter made construction very difficult,” she said. She lives in the Mane Tsermo area of Leh town.
Victims of last year’s flash floods in Ladakh were offered white-metal-and-sponge rooms made from ‘pre-painted galvanised iron’ -- commonly known as prefabricated rooms. The cost of a room, whose walls came readymade and were assembled on cement stilts, was Rs 500,000. Companies like NTPC, ONGC, SAIL, also the Prime Minister’s Office, provided funds for the rooms under their corporate social responsibility budgets; the rooms were constructed by Hindustan Prefab Ltd, a PSU under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation.
The prefabricated rooms, however, were of little use to the people. They did not protect against the severe Ladakhi winter when temperatures drop to below -30 degrees C. “These rooms, unlike the mud brick rooms prevalent in Ladakh, do not soak humidity, leading to condensation of even human breath. In the Ladakhi winter, one needs a house made of insulating material like mud. Also, it will never survive a flood let alone an earthquake,” said Rebecca Norman, a teacher at the Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh, an alternative learning institute in Phey village that has buildings built on the passive solar housing model.
Solar Colony in Choglamsar, the area worst-affected by the floods, is the largest resettlement colony. The rugged landscape here is lined with white-and-brown structures in a row, unlike most Ladakhi houses that are defined by space between dwellings. Around 170 families in Solar Colony received rooms from Hindustan Prefab Ltd. People who managed to get labour constructed a kitchen of mud bricks alongside the prefab room; those who could not procure labour, thanks to the high rates, simply locked up their rooms in the winter and took a house on rent in Choglamsar.
“There are about 20 such families who have locked up their rooms and gone,” said Lotos Karma who lives in Solar Colony. “It is not possible to stay in this room in the winter. Fortunately, we were able to construct a drawing room before the winter set in and my entire family sleeps there now. We use the prefab room as a storage area. They did not even make a chimney for the bukhari. A bukhari is an absolute necessity in the winter here. But this room becomes a smokehouse if we use a bukhari, and opening the window brings in cold waves,” said Karma, whose family consists of eight members.
“Prefab rooms can survive temperatures ranging from -30 degrees to 30 degrees. The army even uses prefab on the Siachan glacier,” said Charan Singh, project engineer of Hindustan Prefab, when this reporter visited Solar Colony in November last year.
“We don’t know about the army, but we certainly cannot stay here. The door got jammed in the morning because of the ice. My 60-year-old mother-in-law developed pain in her joints and limbs from sleeping in blankets that became damp as soon as the bukhari went off,” said Jigmat Wanchen of Mane Tsermo. “But we had no option as our house totally collapsed and we had no money or labour to construct a new house,” she said showing us the wet blankets and walls full of soot from cooking.
“It’s like an air-tight refrigerator. Even our breath freezes, and when it melts everything is damp. If you breathe here, the carbon dioxide you exhale remains inside unless you open the doors,” said Tsering Angmo, also a resident of Solar Colony. Tashi Dolma, her neighbour, stored an entire supply of meat for the winter in the prefab room. “The prefab room is a cold storage; there was no chance of it getting spoilt,” she joked.
Young boys and men in Mane Tsermo have pasted posters of famous bodybuilders in Pasang Dolma’s prefab house, and have been using it as a gym with a single piece of weightlifting equipment. “We only use this room for storing supplies in the winter, but the boys found the cold atmosphere inside it suitable for a gym. So I thought: at least it’s being put to some use,” she said.
“Prefabricated houses were introduced only after consulting the people. They were given in addition to a relief package of Rs 2 lakh to construct houses. It was not possible to build so many houses before the winter set in, in November, thanks to a labour scarcity. So prefabs were an immediate relief,” said T Angchok, deputy commissioner of Leh. “These rooms are completely insulated, and of much better quality than those that were set up in Uri, in Kashmir, after the 2005 earthquake. People did use these rooms, especially those who had no other option. For the cold one has to use bukharis in every sort of room, not just prefab rooms. Ventilation is a problem, I agree, because there is only one window and it usually jams in winter. But nobody complained to us,” he said.
“They did ask us whether we needed rooms, and we agreed. But how could we know what the rooms would be made of? All we could think of then was a roof over our heads,” said Pasang Dolma.
Non-profits working on housing in Ladakh say nothing is better than mud to survive Ladakh’s harsh weather. “This was just a one-winter solution. In winter, it is difficult to construct houses so the government should have relied on the strong social support structure existing in Ladakh where relatives take over the responsibility of their less-endowed brethren. They could have asked people to stay on rent, and the government should have borne the rent. A stop-gap measure of Rs 5 lakh each does not make much sense,” said Mohammad Hasnain, former director of the Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDeG) an organisation that works with architecture and passive solar heating.
NGOs like LEDeG and Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation supported families by paying their rent and providing bukharis and fuelwood for the winter. LEDeG also constructed around 14 mud houses, in Choglamsar and Shey villages, that are earthquake-resistant and built on the passive solar heating model. “A one-room house with an attached toilet cost us Rs 3 lakh each -- much less than the prefab structure,” said Hasnain.