The Difference Between Cutcha and Pucca Buildings..!

By Mr. Sathya Prakash Varnashi

Two words not originally part of English vocabulary, but now well understood in India to distinguish informal & proper buildings are ‘cutcha’ and ‘pucca.’

In Hindi, cutcha buildings are supposed to be temporary make shift arrangements, while the pucca ones are durable professional constructions.

These age-old definitions are still valid, but with sustainability discussions having taken centre-stage, they can also represent low embodied energy and high embodied energy approaches.

Everything that we can name, like building bye laws, design codes, college education, contractual systems, bank loan procedures & such others, have continuously discarded the cutcha approach in urban areas citing many reasons, but at a huge environmental cost and a lost opportunity for possible personal savings.

When the British introduced professional & formal modes of construction, backed by elaborate procedures documented in writing, no one would have then realised that the eco-friendly and cost-effective architecture of pre-colonial India was to change forever.

Mr. Sathya Prakash Varnashi

Over those decades, many instruction handbooks had to be produced to change the local practices & finally when the PWD  (Public Works Department) manuals got published about a century ago, with clearly stated specifications for materials, sketches for details and procedures for construction as an all-India standard, the formalisation of Indian construction had come to stay.

The PWD Influence..!

Today the PWD may represent only government projects, but the PWD approach altered the way even the private buildings were designed and built. The societal desire for such pucca buildings has never stopped since then, moving from mud walls to brick walls to cement blocks to concrete construction to aluminium coated panels and tinted glass boxes.

Alongside the above shift in materials, the parallel journey of cost, wastage & energy has also been one of upwardly consuming.

Paradoxically, more than half of the Indian population still lives in cutcha houses, in rural structures, urban slums & low income homes, with many such houses being centuries old. It is common to see high-end resorts build in cutcha style, charging us astronomical tariffs.

Private roadside facilities work 24 x 7 in simple local materials, seemingly permanently. If we take a long train or / bus journey, every settlement along the trip appears to be cutcha.

 Driving through our State capitals, even today we see old schools, tiled roofs, thatch huts, open verandahs, lime constructions, surface decorations, urban villages & such others, performing on average like any other formal city building.

Advantages..!

We not only see the cutcha everywhere, we hear that such simple buildings are cooler in summer, have no cracks & are cheap to maintain. If this is true, there must be something wrong in the propaganda about the cutcha as temporary and makeshift.

Equally, there must be some lessons on ecology & economy to learn from them, for modern day application, if not for blind repetition.

Traditional buildings are cooler in summer, have no cracks & are cheap to maintain..!

About the author..!

 Sathya Prakash Varanashi studied architecture in Bangalore, urban design in Delhi &  heritage conservation in England. A former Professor of Architecture, he is involved in academics, outreach activities, freelance writing, professional associations and NGO initiatives.

Right from his early days, Mr.Sathya Prakash Varanashi  was attracted to designs ideas rooted in cost, culture, climate and creativity, thanks to the influence of architects like Mr. Laurie Baker, Mr.Shankar Kanade, Mr. K. Jaisim, Mr.A.G.K. Menon and Mr.K.T. Ravindran. His consultancy firm, Sathya Consultants, in Bangalore has been professing and practising eco-friendly cost-effective architecture for the past 15 years.

These articles were authored by Sathya and published  in  THE HINDU on their Saturday’s Column titled Property Plus.  These are archived and republished here by Rajesh Kav.

For more details please visit

http://sathyaconsultants.wordpress.com/

Email: sathyaconsultants@vsnl.net

Share: