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Brick by brick towards a brighter future By Anthony
Fernando The much-maligned
unhygienic estate line-rooms, home to estate worker families for
several decades, are giving way to two-storey apartment style houses
with electricity, pipe-borne water supply and individual toilets
and bathrooms, which will provide the families with comfortable
shelter, enabling them to leave behind the squalour of the line-rooms. The programme
commenced as a pilot project in June 2002 and today 400 apartment
units are almost complete in two tea plantation groups in the Hatton,
Dickoya and Lindula areas, with only the finishing touches to be
given for the occupants to go into residence later this month. These
apartment-housing blocks are constructed on the same land earlier
occupied by line-rooms. The worker families willingly made way by
accommodating themselves in temporary huts nearby and watched their
future homes come up brick by brick... Each new unit
comprises a living room, kitchen, attached bath and toilet on the
ground floor plus two bedrooms on the upper floor. The total floor
area is 560 square feet per unit - a spacious area compared to the
120 square feet that a family of seven to eight members had to live
in, in the line-rooms. The new housing unit comes complete with
electricity supplies and pipe-borne water supplies.Life in the line-rooms
(where one had to make do with common toilets and baths, which lacked
basic sanitary facilities; lights, if at all, provided by a single
bulb) will soon be a thing of the past. Constructed
by state agencies, with occupant families contributing their mite
if they wished to, the project is being implemented by the Ministry
of Housing and Plantation Infrastructure through the National Housing
Development Authority and Estate Worker Housing Co-operative Societies.
Funding is by the Ministry of Housing and Plantation Infrastructure
and the NHDA. One of the important features of the project is that the estate workers have the right of ownership of the houses. The line-rooms, after the privatization of estates in 1992 were kept in the custody of the state for granting of tenureship rights to the workers. The cost of each housing unit is estimated to be around Rs. 250,000/-. This will be recovered through the respective Estate Worker Co-operative Societies, the President of which is the Superintendent of the Estate. The Co-op Societies will recover the instalments from the wages of the workers and refund them to the Ministry of Housing. Funds for construction too are channelled through the Society and construction work is carried out and supervised by the National Housing Development Authority. One such apartment
style-housing complex is at Wanarajah Estate Lower Division (owned
by Bogawantalawa Plantations) at Dickoya, eight kilometres from
Hatton, along the Bogawantalawa-Hatton Road. Here 104 housing units
have been constructed for104 families. 8 km away, in the Warleigh Division also belonging to Wanarajah Estate, in a picturesque setting with the backdrop of the Castlereigh Reservoir, are 104 housing units of 560 sq ft. each. All 208 houses at Wanarajah Estate are built with low cost pre-fabricated material using technology developed by the National Engineering Research and Development Centre (NERD). Engineer at the site Athula Munasinghe attached to the Estate Housing Division of the Ministry of Housing explaining the concept said that the slab, doors and window frames and the staircase are prefabricated. Walls are made of cement blocks made under special specifications. About 15 km
away, past Lindula at Henford Estate in Tispana is another cluster
of apartment houses of a slightly different model. One hundred of
the 200 single storied houses have already been completed. Here
the construction work is undertaken by the State Engineering Corporation
using concrete prefabricated structures turned out by the SEC. Mr. W.D. Ailapperuma,
Secretary, Ministry of Housing and Plantation Infrastructure, explaining
the concept, said estate workers were reluctant to leave the line-rooms
where they had lived for generations when they were offered land
to build houses in the periphery of the estate. "It was the
second generation of families who occupied the new houses. Even
rehabilitation of the line-rooms mostly through re-roofing though
having an impact on short term needs did not meet the workers' long-term
aspirations in improving their living environment." He said that
in 1995 a programme was started to help estate workers to build
new housing units in the periphery of the estate on housing loans
of Rs 30,000 each and other grants. However though nearly 6000 housing
units were constructed under the programme, the package was not
met with much enthusiasm from worker families. Besides, some could
not build their houses as it had to be done on a self-help basis
and the majority did not have the time to engage in house construction. With the success of this pilot project, the Ministry hopes to obtain foreign funding to carry forward the project to cover large segments of the estate worker population.
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