The Gazetteers Department

According to the 1951 Census there are 2,74,957 occupied houses in the district (61.55 per square mile). Of these 1,94,024 were in rural areas and 80,92.1 in the urban areas. These houses accommodated 14,61,345 households. This gives an average of 1.11 households for each occupied house, 1.07 in rural area and 1.17 in urban area.

There are two chief styles of houses in the district, the flat-roofed and the tiled. Tiled roofs were once confined to villages north of the Tapi river but they became more or less universal in course of time by the end of the last century. In the towns, tiled roofs were the order but during the thirties, forties and fifties of the present century, cement-concrete construction with a terrace above has become the fashion in keeping with the vogue in several other urban centres in the country. Slowly they are getting into fashion even in villages. Baked brick for cement concrete constructions is used everywhere whereas unbaked, sun-dried bricks were used for old houses which were mostly flat-roofed. Mud and mortar are both in use. The window frames, doorposts and rafters are generally of teak or nim wood and often the door panels and window shutters are of mango wood. Stone is scarcely used except for foundation. Houses are usually built facing north or south and in some villages there is said to exist a prejudice against eastern or western fronts for houses.

A trader's house has a verandah or old, which if he is a retail trader, is turned into his shop. Inside the verandah is the sitting room and beyond the sitting room the dining hall in the middle and three rooms on each side. Among the side rooms, to the left of the dining hall, are the office room, the shrine and the lying-in-room, and to the right a treasure room and two store-rooms one of which being used as a kitchen. Behind this group comes the back verandah with a privy in one corner. There is usually a back or a side door.

A well-to-do village patil's house begins with a large gate, with a ward-room on either side, where the watchman sleeps and kit is piled or where office work is done. Then comes a yard with a central well and cattle sheds on either side or all round. Then a flight of steps leads to the first door and a long house, with first a sitting room, where swings or zoolas are kept and a dining room with two rooms on each side. In such houses cattle enter by the front door.

The bulk of the peasants' houses are of the superior type of dhaba houses or the inferior type of houses known as chhappars. A dhaba house is said to last for many years if it is kept in good repairs. The walls of clay and chopped grass or straw thoroughly kneaded under buffaloes' feet taper slightly and average from 18 inches to 22 inches in thickness. The flat or nearly flat roof rests on strong teakwood beams which run from wall to wall. Over the beams is laid a layer of strong branches of trees and a coating of dried sugarcane leaves, the whole with a gentle slope to one of the corners where a wooden spout throws off the water several feet from the foundation of the wall.

The chhappar type of house has either clay walls or merely a thick fence of cotton stalks or other wattled bows. The roof is made of long grass tied neatly to a bamboo framework with an intricate layer of palas leaves in the middle of the grass so as to make the roof perfectly waterproof. Over the thatch, split millet stems are sometimes laid to make it look like tiles. Generally Kolis, Bhils, Vanjaris and Mahars live in such huts.

The tendency, however, whether in towns or villages is of late to go in for more or less pakka construction and the use of burnt bricks, cement and concrete is getting increasingly popular. The only restriction on such construction is ability to spend. It is not unusual to notice such houses even in villages having a population of. one thousand. They are small and bungalow type and well ventilated according to modern standards.

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