HOUSING CONDITION OF TRIBAL AND NON-TRIBAL HOUSEHOLDS IN JORHAT DISTRICT- A COMPARATIVE STUDY
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Date
2017-07
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AAU, Jorhat
Abstract
Housing is the physical structure providing shelter, consuming land and providecertain basic services. It has a specific location and once made it is durable (Gandotra, 2006). Keeping it in view the present study on ‘Housing condition of tribal and non-tribal households in Jorhat district- A comparative study’ was carried out in Jorhat district of Assam with the following objectives- To study the housing environment of tribal and non-tribal households. To study the selected factors affecting tribal and non-tribal housing conditions. To study the awareness level of house wives towards the quality housing conditions. In the present study comparison of housing condition of Tribal and non-Tribal housing conditions was done where the tribal respondents belonged to the Mishing community which is a major Assamese tribe. The study was conducted by purposive and simple random sampling method. Two agricultural development officer (ADO) circles located in two development blocks of Jorhat district namely Titabar development block and Kaliapani block were purposively considered for the study having basically agrarian population of both tribal (Mishing) and non-tribal. One tribal and one non-tribal village from each block were selected purposively so that comparison can be done properly having the villages situated in the same locality (block). Accordingly 20 tribal households and 20 non- tribal households from each village were selected by following simple random sampling method and accordingly a total 80 households were selected as sample. It was revealed that the tribal and non-tribal households of similar family income differ in their housing structure. Tribal households had stilted house with raised platform of 5-7feet above ground level, they had less humidity level in their houses and showed no evidence of dampness. They had no drainage facilities for draining out the waste water. They washed utensils on the raised floor (Chang) and let the water fall underneath. Half of the tribal households use to keep their live stocks under the platform where they lived.They mostly incinerate their household waste. Tribal respondents had low cost sanitary latrine provided by government schemes and by the
NGOs as compared to the non-tribal respondents which was 55% and were mostly self-constructed. It was encouraging to note that, none of the non- tribal respondents had dug hole latrines and also they did not defecate in open spaces. Open defecation of 12.5% was found among tribal respondents. The study also revealed that majority of the tribal households had bamboo netting as smoke outlet in their house for removal of smoke from the kitchen. Regarding illumination at day and night inside the house, it was found that recommended intensity of daylight and night light was unavailable in many of the rooms in tribal households and thus rooms were inadequately bright. On the other hand, houses of non-tribal respondents were not raised on stilts but on plinth with a height varying from 2-3 feet from the ground level. Humidity level inside many of the rooms was higher than the recommended level and a sign of dampness was observed. They had improper drainage facilities and mostly they kept their live stocks near the house. Majority of them dump their household waste. Recommended intensity of daylight was unavailable in some rooms but majority of them had adequate lighting in recommended level in almost all the rooms at night. They had proper arrangement, grouping and provision of flexibility in the room as compared to the tribal households. Regarding quality of potable water it was not found to be within the recommended level. Experiments revealed that the average bacterial count in the raw form of tube well water used by the tribal (126 CFU/ml) and non-tribal households (124.33 CFU/ml) was almost similar and was higher than the filtered and boiled forms of water used by both the groups. Overall awareness regarding quality of housing condition meeting the criteria of principles of residential planning was less among tribal respondents (22.5%) as compared to the non-tribal respondents (39.43%).