The village Azadpura is located 11 kms from Jhansi and 2.5 kms from TARAGram towards Orchha. It is a part of the Newari block of Tikamgarh district in the state of Madhya Pradesh. It has a total population of about 850, dominated by the Yadavs, Rajputs and the Sahariyas (308 in nos, with 63 households). The main occupation of the people in the village is agriculture and wage labour. The village has a government primary school. For further education the nearest higher secondary school is in Orchha.

Tara Gramin Nirman Kendra (TGNK), a rural building centre of Development Alternatives at TARAGram, is committed to the delivery of sustainable building technologies leading to improved shelter and has been working on building technology solutions suitable to this region. It works for the villagers and with them in trying to answer their basic needs of shelter, while generating employment for the people. TGNK assists the villager to find sustainable niches for himself, while providing building material options in the rural as well as the urban areas. Some of the objectives of TGNK include:

With these objectives, Azadpura was TGNK’s first venture into the realm of rural social housing and settlements.

In the existing layout of the settlement, most of the houses were laid out in a line, sharing common walls around one central courtyard. A few families later isolated themselves to peripheral areas away from the cluster. Over the years, other castes settled around the Sahariya settlement and the village started growing organically.

The existing settlement plan had a prominent hierarchy of open spaces, a big courtyard at the centre of the settlement leading to smaller ones in front of each house, every house being defined by a low raised platform - a significant delineation of the ‘threshold’. There was no space between the house and the street, the streets integrating with the house and providing space for outdoor activities.

The houses are basically used for storage of valuables and sleeping in winter. Most of their other activities are otherwise concentrated outside.

The houses have only one entrance and few windows for security reasons.

With sloping roofs of country tiles on wooden understructure and thick walls of stone, bricks and mud, these houses are very low, allowing hardly any light and ventilation in the house.

Maintaining the modest character of existing Azadpura houses while designing the settlement was a challenge to the design team. The essence of these functions and spaces had to be retained in the resultant layout with only necessary modifications. Their new houses had also to follow their existing life-styles.

Introduction to ‘toilets’ was a new concept in the village and it was considered important to make them conscious of health and hygiene issues. The concept of outdoor living was retained by the introduction of the "Otla"- a raised platform in front of the new houses developing the space around the house into a connecting link between the exterior and the interior and helping in reducing the scale. The enthusiasm of designing their own spaces led to a layout which, while being distinct, merges with the existing settlement.

The whole concept of ‘participatory planning’ was evolved with the house owners in harmony with their existing settlement, as most of the beneficiaries wanted their old houses to be retained and merged with the new ones. There was no site plan of the existing layout when work began and therefore space planning and design considerations were done on the site, with the users and the mason. This led to the instinctive evolution of spaces by the people, together with the mason’s logical thinking. The whole process thus resulted into an intense interaction between the two.

People were able to contribute in terms of materials apart from labour and had the advantage of adding more elements to their houses. A few of them who had their plots away from the present houses had to demolish their old houses since they wanted to stay at their existing sites. These people contributed stone, murum etc. and got a larger otla and a confined courtyard in front of their houses. These were small things which added identity to each house and its owner.

Thus, an organic space resulted in the form of clusters. While the old settlement houses were aligned in a straight line next to each other around a big courtyard, the orientation of the new houses was according to the existing elements of the settlement, like streets, trees, water sources, existing courtyards, pathways etc. People were not restricted to a definite geometry, resulting in a settlement plan merging with the existing one.
 

The use of CEB in government construction was a major breakthrough of this programme. There was a strong reluctance amongst the people in the beginning as CEB was a new technology never used by them earlier. Each house owner initially produced his own blocks but the process of self-production of the blocks could not be systematised. Eventually work had to be temporarily discontinued after the construction of five houses and a common team was formed, including people from the village and trainers from TGNK. Changes were made in the percentage of current stabilisation in the CEBs as per people’s recommendations and a production of about 55,000 blocks took place over a period of six months, creating local employment for over two months. Not only was there a renewed confidence in the villagers but people were willing to contribute more towards construction of their houses as they were getting local employment opportunities through activities like the CEB production.

When the project started, five houses were constructed using Random Rubble Masonry till the Cill level and CEB as the main walling with MCR tiles on wooden understructure as the roofing material. Random Rubble Masonry demanded skill and intense supervision, which in turn affected the time of construction and hence the cost. Concrete Block masonry was eventually adopted in its place for the superstructure upto the Cill level, which was faster and required comparatively less masonry skill and was efficient with respect to available internal space. An effort was made in the Azadpura project to combine the locally available skills with TGNK technologies. Eventually, a consolidated team, comprising of masons and semi-masons from the village, were identified, who are now working in other external projects taken up by TARAGram with the same materials. These masons are in the process of being initiated into artisan guilds to enable increased earnings through improved building practices.

The construction process provided an excellent opportunity for intense training of masons and semi-masons as construction was time bound and both quality and cost were crucial parameters. Most of the people of the construction team were from the village itself, which also helped in increasing people’s confidence in the technologies. Building systems evolved out of the local house owner’s need and desired aesthetics of scale and proportions.
 

The process of construction in Azadpura was possible due to management structures, which enabled the project to be completed within the estimated six months. After the completion of the dwelling units, when the construction of toilets started, the masons were grouped into a team with a semi-mason/helper and they were given the responsibility of handling a definite number of sites on their own and controlling the cost of the toilets. This initiated them to keep a check on the speed of construction, without compromising on the quality and to involve the beneficiaries while maintaining material flow to their sites and filling up the daily progress reports, calculating the rates and thereby controlling the resultant cost. This exercise with the masons added another dimension to the efforts of TGNK towards skill development and capacity building.

Time was an important factor for cost-control and innovations through use of prefabricated systems like the Concrete Blocks, instead of the resource inefficient local stone and the use of RCC Chaukhats and CEB, ensured the speed of construction. Unit Rates, Bill of Quantities for the repetitive units were prepared and benchmarking done to arrive at optimum productivity levels.

This has probably been the crucial factor which made the Azadpura housing process into an experience in impacting life-styles. From the beginning, women were identified as being the house owners and so were the focus of the entire participative exercise. As an entry point activity, TARAGram had co-ordinated with the Madhya Pradesh Hasta Shilp Vikas Nigam for a training programme in fibre-based handicrafts for 14 Sahariya women who were included in the beneficiary list. Skill upgradation, balwadi for their children and literacy classes for both the women and the children were conducted regularly, which helped in increasing awareness while being earning members in their families. They became important allies in the house construction process.

Although TGNK was a major prime mover in the dissemination of the process of participatory house building with sustainable building technologies, the role of local catalytic agencies cannot be ignored. In retrospect, it seems evident that the strong feeling among this homogeneous Sahariya community for change materialised in the form of these 49 houses. There were leaders amongst them, like the 55 year-old local ‘Dai’ (mid-wife) - Bua, who was amongst the first few willing to take the plunge. Over 15 years of promises by the government with no result had moreover frustrated the people. The existence of TARAGram, the Appropriate Technology Centre which was creating local employment and local goodwill, was a point in TGNK’s favour.

A summary of the management and development aspects of the Azadpura process is given in Table 1.

The entire exercise was completed within six months and was for TGNK an intense learning exercise on the ‘Power of the People’ and their capacity to determine their own destinies. For Azadpura this has resulted in :

The ripple effect of this process cannot be undermined. MCR has been accepted into the Government Rural Engineering Services specifications. This has led to the roofing of 65 more houses for the bidi workers in Tikamgarh. The concept of rural sanitation has also taken a boost, with people from the village wanting toilets built. It would be unfair to judge this project by only the direct benefits. It is a true example of an asset leading to asset multiplication in the local economy in the form of ‘material-assets’ as well as ‘people-assets’ through skills.

It is also an example of impacting life-styles of people below the poverty line through improved shelter and habitat. q