But while urbanites may feel that village houses should retain their traditional appearance - and therefore be made of wood, stone, mud etc. - villagers themselves are quick to point to the irony in this: the well-meaning urbanites themselves have long ago abandoned traditional housing!
Low cost, aesthetics, preserving traditions, and living in climatically suitable houses are all fine notions, but the durability of homes is also an important consideration.
A mud house with a thatched roof needs continuous maintenance, whereas a brick and cement house is far sturdier, and has a longer life span. And villagers are as interested in the longevity of their homes as their urban counterparts.
But a traditional rural residence has important advantages - it is almost always based on adaptations to the local environment, and is often built with the labour of the villagers themselves without the need for external mechanised inputs.
The simplest way to build a house, in the past, was to look around for the materials needed for the structure, and begin building the structure yourself. For the construction of village homes, therefore, the challenge today is to acknowledge people's desire for long-lasting structures, and thereafter ask what elements of functionality, value and aesthetics can be infused into the buildings. One person who took up this challenge vigorously was M N Joglekar, a former Executive Director of the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO).
A professional architect, Joglekar went beyond the standard knowledge of construction to study not just how these houses are constructed but how they are lived in. He set out to use rationalized traditional technologies, which are amply displayed at the Rural Building Centre of National Institute of Rural Development (NIRD) in Hyderabad.
Fourteen typologies of rural buildings - from those in the Himalayan region to the hilly North-East to the rain-battered coasts to arid Kutch and the Deccan Plateau - stand in a circle, exuding aesthetics enhanced by the pictorial natural setting of the Rural Technology Park of NIRD campus. Recognising the great potential in promoting local-material-based traditional technologies, HUDCO had initiated the Rural Building Centre concept where building components can be manufactured by the rural people using local available material and through skill upgradation.
Through this centre, precast components could be given to the rural people instead of cash, which is the typical form of assistance for home construction.
