LAND, BRICK & MORTAR

The immediate fallout of dismantling the protective provisions in August 2019 is that outside entrepreneurs have become an intermediary between the government and the local businessman. This is showing up in a sharp spike in the prices of construction materials, be it sand, bricks or bajri. Added to this has been an increase in the cost of labour making it all the more difficult for the average middle class local to own a dwelling, reports Khalid Bashir Gura

- Khalid Bashir Gura

Zahid Ahmad, 40, a resident of old city Srinagar, planned to construct his house. He thought of moving out of the congested old house where he lived with his elder siblings. A year later, his dream of having his own house is nowhere near realization as the escalation in construction material costs has made it prohibitively expensive to do so.

Ahmad, a Kashmir handicrafts dealer, was living in South India for the past two decades. “Constructing a house was not that costly earlier as official impediments and procedures were less,” Ahmad said as he started realizing the cost of constructing a house. At the very start, he had to cough up two lakh rupees as stamp duty for the land he acquired. “I had no problem with legal procedures but when the municipality and police questioned the legal construction that took me by surprise.”

Finally, he said, he did what Romans do - greased palms of different officials at different levels. As he moved towards construction, Ahmad was shocked by the sudden soaring of construction material costs.

“The extra labour costs and sudden soaring of prices are back-breaking,” Ahmad said. “I had never estimated this worst-case scenario,” he said.

Ahmad said he spent many days enquiring rates from different kilns from South to Central Kashmir but was disillusioned. “I don’t know if there is any fixed rate. Initially, when I chalked out the budget I had estimated the cost of a truckload of bricks for Rs 21000 and sand Rs 6000,” said Ahmad. He now pays Rs 27000 for a truckload of bricks and Rs 10500 -13000 for a truckload of sand. The labour cost to ferry the bricks to the site of construction adds Rs 2500 per truckload.