India Concept House : Solution To Low Cost Housing

By Author: Pritesh Bagwe
Total Articles: 14
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By Sibani Sarma

In December 2011 RICS in partnership with SamCircle ventures, Projectwell and KieranTimberlake launched a concrete panel based prefabricated mass housing concept. A white paper titled ‘India Concept House – manufacturing and assembling of an affordable, quick to build and sustainable mass housing solution for Indian cities’ was released by R.V. Verma, CMD, National Housing Bank. The white paper describes complete off-site housing solution including its supply chain, modularity and expansion, wall and roof components, manufacture process, development time, and delivery mechanisms.

India is currently falling short of 27 million houses out of which 70% falls under affordable housing group. Therefore, this panel based and quick to build housing solution can reduce the housing supply-demand gap in India. This concept is different from other prefabricated projects already present in market as this will involve a process by which homes are produced through a managed supply chain. India Concept House (ICH) is designed as 23, 46, 70 and 93 Sq.m increments. Its modular construction system enables ...
... a 23 square meter home to be built in four weeks and a 93 square meter house to be built in six weeks.

As compared to the traditional construction, the construction time in ICH can be reduced by 90%. In a current scenario, housing as an industry is still hand crafted and heavily depended on unskilled labour and on site construction. This results in large amount of material wastage and labour in efficiency, leaving aside the quality and thermal comfort level.

The components in ICH are easily transportable, eliminating the need for material handling equipment. The house is designed to reduce energy usage by 50%. It achieves an even temperature throughout the year. There is a provision to capture and recycle water. Housing in Indian scenario is not standardized and the quality differs from region to region. By bringing strong supply chain mechanism and assembly line production ICH will bring standardization in housing construction.

ICH will now be proto typed and to be assessed in the Indian climatic and seismic conditions. This will then be evaluated for manufacturing, delivery mechanisms, thermal comfort, and energy and water consumption. ICH will be promoted as the concept to the housing industry as an example of the kind of prefabricated and offsite mass housing solutions which can revolutionise the market for affordable mass housing solutions in India.

For more information log on to:
http://www.projectwell.com/