While on one hand, the Union Territory witnesses feverish activities pertaining to housing with several residential colonies coming up on agricultural lands, Census figures, on the other hand, denote that house ownership in Puducherry has gone down by 3.5 per cent.
The number of owned households have gone down to 64.9 per cent in 2011 from 68.4 per cent in 2001, the data revealed. Interestingly, this was when housing activities increased by 45 per cent with 1.2 lakh homes added in the last decade in the UT. At the national level, the house ownership had increased by 33 per cent with nearly eight crore households added to the already existing ones.
According to the Census data, Puducherry had a total of 3,01,276 households, with 2,06,143 in urban areas and 95,133 in rural areas. As many as 1,95,610 dwellings were owned houses, while 93,807 houses were rented. Around 40 per cent of the houses had single dwelling room, 31 per cent had two rooms and 15.5 per cent had three rooms. Around 5.2 per cent of the population, numbering 15,737, had no exclusive room and the entire family lived in a single living space.
Interestingly, 2,06,221 households (68.4 per cent) had toilet facility within the house while another 13,274 (4.4 per cent) used public conveniences. In contrast, members of 81,781 households (27.1 per cent) defecated in the open. Moreover, 49,782 (16.5 per cent) of the households did not have bathing facilities.
A small percentage of homes (5.3 per cent) did not have a kitchen and cooked outside in the open and 1,773 households (0.6 per cent) did not cook at all. However, LPG had penetrated 70 per cent of the households (2,12,517 homes). Firewood continued to be used in 18 per cent of the homes, including charcoal, crop residue and cow dung cakes. Kerosene was being used in 21,754 households for cooking.
Though nearly 91 per cent of the homes in the UT had access to treated drinking water supplied through taps, less than five per cent homes used untreated tap water and 1.8 per cent drew water from uncovered wells.