Lok Awaas Yatra (LAY) is a celebration of the success of big and small initiatives of village communities, Panchayati Raj Institutions, Government departments, corporate bodies and NGOs around sustainable habitat development.

Designed as an important milestone in the journey of basin-South Asia Regional Knowledge Platform - to draw policy attention to the issues of safe and sustainable development of rural habitat - the Yatra aims to bridge a critical knowledge gap in between ‘what should be done’ and ‘how it can be done’. It has a clear bias in favour of people-based initiatives that make use of low carbon construction technologies and environment-friendly habitat infrastructure systems to deliver quality habitat to village communities. The Yatra facilitates a deeper, firsthand understanding of the ‘how’ of these solutions for the benefit of rural habitat practitioners in the hope that these good practices can be adapted and applied in larger numbers across the country.

The Yatra has been designed as a series of five regional yatras to enable learning structured around geo-climatic similarities in the central, north, south, east and west regions of India. The blueprint of the regional yatras comprises 3 trails in each region that follow different paths to cover 5-6 good practice projects and converge at a regional seminar where the learnings are shared, analysed and State-level rural habitat policy imperatives articulated.

The first in the series is the Central Region Yatra, comprising three trails covering Marathwada, Vidarbha and Bundelkhand regions of central India. The Yatra started on September 8, 2009 and concluded on September 12, 2009 with the Regional seminar at Bhopal.

The Central Region Yatra included projects on alternate, low carbon construction materials and technologies, non-conventional and renewable systems for habitat infrastructure, people-centred post-disaster reconstruction experiences, habitat-based livelihoods and innovative leveraging of government schemes. With these thematic priorities, the individual trails had specific focus on ‘processes’ in the Marathwada trail, ‘technology solutions’ in Vidarbha Trail and ‘habitat-based sustainable livelihoods’ in the Bundelkhand trail.

True to the spirit of the ‘yatra’, the participants battled flat tires, heavy rains and extremely tightly worked out schedules and contributed to the success of this learning journey.

The optimisim in the potential of Rural India’s Movement was summed up in the song led by the Marathwada team ...

Le mashalen, chal pade hain
Log mere gaon ke
Ab andhere jeet lenge
Log mere gaon ke q