KarunaNews Story

Building flood-resilient infrastructure in India could save $5 billion in flood-related losses by 2030, and $30 billion by 2070. Innovations in traditional design in Nikori, a village in one of northeast India’s most flood-prone districts in Assam, are showing the way. Raised bamboo houses known as chang ghars have long offered a low tech and low cost solution, but Nikori and neighboring villages now often remain waterlogged from the end of June sometimes all the way to October. The Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society, an Indian NGO that has been working on disaster management and mitigation since 1994, started working with local masons to develop an improved chang ghar design and in 2018, trained about 20 bamboo masons to implement it on 80 model houses. Constructed with sturdy, local bamboo, chang ghar 2.0 costs about $800 to build, about 20% more than a traditional chang ghar, but the mainframe takes just a week to construct and annual repair costs are generally much lower.