Why we live in unfinished houses ?

Tarun Nongthombam *

An array of unfinished houses in Imphal city

I sometimes wonder, like many of us, why we Manipuris have a habit of living in unfinished houses. We could all think of many possible reasons, which might range from not having enough money, to warding off getting demand letters from unwanted elements or blame our own uncaring attitude. But how beautiful our skyline is?

We all realize when it comes in national television and see the rest of the country skyline a minute after that. Our Khwairamband, which is our central business district of the state, looks more like a makeshift camp. Is this the image, which we should be selling Manipur to the outside world?

Manipur was never an infrastructure-developed state. Our early houses were mainly what we called as yumjao, which had mud walls and e- roof. People who lived in that would be nostalgic as it was cooler during the summer but it was primitive and had little concept of privacy.

As with every biodegradable material, the roof rots with time and was susceptible to leaking and insects falling. Eventually, introduction of GI sheets for roofing made a huge change in the way we built our houses in our state.

House building started picking up couple of decades back in Manipur mainly financed interestingly by retirement funds; thanks to many pay commissions which made many pensioners get enough money to build a proper house for themselves and for their family.

Mostly, people have gone for concrete houses. Building these houses are costly and a person can build one in his whole lifetime. Building a house give you such a strain that there is a famous Manipuri joke; "if you want to ruin a man, make him contest an election or build a house".

Building a house can be broadly divided into two stages. The first stage is to build the framework, which includes foundations, pillars, beams, brick wall etc, in simple terms, building of outer cover. Next stage is to make it livable that includes plastering, flooring, plumbing, electric fitting, woodwork, painting etc.

As a rule of thumb, expect equal amount of money for completing the second stage as in the first one, if not more. If you observe most of the houses in Manipur they are stuck with the first stage and this raises the question, whether we can afford these kinds of houses with our budget?

I would put a part of the blame to local architect and engineering community. They have failed to come up with cheap and reliable house design, which uses local and easy available material.

Does the story end here? Put blame on not having enough money or is it the attitude "Everybody does that, so why should I be different?" Visiting any of the home in mainland, even the lower grade employee like peon, one would find a small waiting room, proper bed room and toilet, not the fancy one but the level which he could afford.

If you happen to go along Jiri road for Guwahati, make sure you see those nicely painted village houses lining Shillong hills along National Highway-44. It is just developing a habit of keeping the aesthetic pleasing and remembering charity starts at home. This is where we Manipuris have a lot to learn from others.

Gone are the days of less population with lot of land and concept of 'enkhol manung', where we all live in a small-related sagei community and what you need is a pond to bathe and a common toilet. With the breaking up of this concept, people are now realizing the need of privacy and many are busy putting up compounds walls. This is resulting in fighting neighborhoods in almost all the valley areas, thanks to our little understanding and disregard of having a proper property line earlier.

The demand and change is going to be rapid for housing in time to come. Providing good affordable houses for the masses will be a big challenge for our state government and policy makers need to identify measures to tackle this. But how long we will continue living in our unfinished houses? Only time will tell.