Driving back to Delhi from Bhind in Madhya Pradesh on a bright winter afternoon our thoughts went back to the time when our roofing tile programme was an altogether different story.....

The year was 1986, mornings would invariably begin for the Shelter Group with an animated discussion on some aspect of the housing problem.  We would wait for the research centre in the Indian Institute of Technology's campus, sto be unlocked.  Then out came the imported fibre concrete roofing tile-making kit.  We would set the equipment upto make a few tiles and quite literally, lay them to rest in the curing tank.  It was a pretty scene.  Picture a few people sitting in the sun, one mixing a tray full of cement and sand, another chopping a bunch of coconut fibre and a third dreaming of "Shelter for all by the year 2000".

It is 1993 now.  There are not just a few tiles in our tanks.  200,000 of them are up on roofs in the villages and small towns of Bundelkhand, not to speak of more in other parts of the country.  Gone is the coconut fibre.  We now have micro-concrete tile and our very own TARA equipment to make them.  But the most satisfying part of the story is that the Shelter Group has not laid a single tile on these roofs; it is the local people that have done it.  The entrepreneur who produced the tiles, his machine operators and rood layers, the villagers who paid for better shelter and the middlemen who sold it to them.  All vital role players in a healthy building economy.  And what did we do ?  The Shelter Group initiated change.  We thought beyond architecture and civil engineering, design, construction, demonstration projects and housing schemes.  We realised that shelter is a process people take charge of.  After all, housing systems are organisms with lives of their own.  There is however, a subtle difference, pointed out beautiful by the Egyptian master builder Hassan Fathy.  He wrote:

"While the characteristics of a living creature are irrevocably settled at the moment of fertilization,
the characteristics of a building are determined by the whole complex of decisions made by everyone
that has a say in the matter, at every stage of its construction.  Thus the instant of conception on which
the final form of living creature rests becomes for a building a multiplicity of such instants, each
playing a decisive part in the total creative process.

If we can identify and seize these instants, then we can control the whole process of creation."

(Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the poor, Pg. 22, University of Chicago Press, 1969)