Description

500 million people out of a population of 670 million are living in rural areas.

Most of the rural houses are built with earth.

A shelter made from earth mainly indicates poverty.

Cement and fired bricks are and will in future be luxury building materials for the majority in rural areas.

Statistics show that in the year 2000 the demand and production of cement will increase, but its shortage will increase three times.

The production of cement and bricks cannot cope with the nation-wide need of millions of Low-Cost-Houses, and is therefore out of the question for the poor.

New industrial building materials and complicated building methods have not found their way into the village yet. Firstly, they are too expensive, and secondly there is the resistance to change habits and ways of life.

A new awareness has to go hand in hand with the new methods and new materials.

Village housing programmes which propose small standardized concrete containers as human dwellings have failed as inhuman, dirty, slum-creative and totally alien to the rural Indian way of life. Still, quite a few Government and private agencies continue to commit the same mistakes over and over again paying scant atten-tion to aesthetic and functional requirements to maintain the typical village social life.

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