The main purpose of the project is to promote appropriate cost-effective disaster-resistant housing technologies for access to safe and affordable shelters by all and to link habitat with sustainable livelihood opportunities.

Main features of the project

The project was designed based on a hypothesis that housing on a mass scale and taking the shape of a movement beyond barriers can be facilitated by addressing to all factors that contribute in making it affordable and safe. For this the strategies of the project were

• To promote local building materials and technologies, • To develop self-supporting systems related to construction in an entrepreneurship mode, • To improve the capacity of the community to access house building options and information/ literature in the vernacular language, • To network aggressively with all stakeholders right from the grassroots at the villages to national and international forums.

The approach for the project is explained graphically through the sketch provided below:

For promotion of local building materials and technologies the activities of Resource Mapping, Training of Trainers, Training of Masons, construction of Technology Demonstration Units (TDUs), etc. were taken up. All these have been detailed out in section 1.2 under the heading “Current activities of the organization”.

The development of self-supporting institution started by grouping the individual masons who were scattered earlier into articulated homogeneous groups in the form of ASHGs. These ASHGs were federated at district level into AFeds and the best performing masons both technically and managerially were formed into DTFs. These DTFs are linked to the ODTF, which is a team of Socio-Technical housing professionals.

Research and Documentation from the lab was followed by active dissemination on land, the objective being to empower people in the art and science of house construction. This along with networking at various tiers led to acquiring and transfer of information and knowledge from the grassroots to the policy makers and vice versa. These have been detailed out in section 1.2 under the heading “Current activities of the organization”.

All the above strategies led towards achieving the objectives of the Housing programme.