Building homes for a cause

Former US President Jimmy Carter is constructing houses for the rural poor

When former US president Jimmy Carter visits India next year, on his itenerary will be a visit to the tiny village of Malvali on the outskrits of Lonavala. Carter, along with his entourage, has pledged to donate his labour to build homes for the rural poor.

As the chief patron of Habitat for Humanity, a trust for providing homes to the homeless, Carter will spend a day at Karjat, digging foundations for 100 houses for people below poverty line.

These are not give-away homes. These, like one lakh other houses built by Habitat for Humanity over the past 10 years, will be built with active participation and contribution of the future inhabitants - the family which will occupy the house.

On Sunday, October 2, the Habitat for Humanity India Trust launched an ambitious programme - India Builds, to construct over 250,000 houses for the rural poor over the next five years. It will involve mobilising Rs 400 crore in cash and kind.

"With India Builds, we plan to build better homes for - and in partnership with - 250,000 poor people by applying the Gandhian principles of volunteerism and community development," said Steve Weir, Habitat for Humanity's Asia-Pacific vice president. "From our three decades of working with communities around the world, we know that a simple, safe and secure home can break the cycle of poverty and transform lives. Proper homes create a circle of better health, education, security, and better opportunities to earn a living."

More than 60 per cent of India's estimated 180 million dwellings are either temporary or in a dilapidated condition. India needs some 2.5 million new homes each year to keep pace with its growing population. The current shortfall is more than 41 million homes.

This year's target: 500 houses at a cost of Rs 6 crore as part of the trust's Youth Build 05 programme, which envisages building homes for the poor at six different locations in India - Karjat, Cuttack, Khammam, Kanyakumari with 100 houses each, and Mahad and Jaipur with 50 houses each.

Said Joseph Scaria, corporate manager, Asia Pacific, "Habitat doesn't believe in giving away houses. Rather, we let people decide how they want to contribute to the building process. Very often the poor people cannot contribute money but they can bring building materials such as sand and stones. So, we attribute a value to these materials and work it off against the building cost."

The rest of the cost comes through corporate contribution, given as interest-free loans to be paid over a stipulated period of time. "Depending on what is paid back, we begin the next phase of building activity in that area. The initial funding in any given area acts as a revolving fund for that area," said Scaria.

Habitat has worked with corporates like the Aditya Birla group, Lupin, Honeywell, Whirlpool and the Tata group on several such housing projects in hinterlands where their plants are located. While they have built houses from scrap steel in Jamshedpur, with the Birla Foundation they have worked in 330 villages near Varanasi.