Order of the High Court of Gujarat in the matter of Samsuddin Jainulabiddin Shaikh & Others Vs The State of Gujarat & Others dated 06/05/2025. A petition was filed by 58 people who are residing near Chandola lake, Ahmedabad. The petitioners have constructed hutments along the periphery of Chandola lake. …
The wisdom of harvesting rainwater to meet growing demands and augment depleting water resources has perhaps at long last caught the attention of the Delhi government. In his address to the Delhi Assembly on the first day of the Budget session, Lieutenant-Governor Vijai Kapoor said the government was planning to …
In a serendipitous discovery, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley, USA, may have found an inexpensive material for making windows more energy efficient. While working on a way to boost the performance of a rechargeable battery, they put a transparent film of nickel hydroxide …
We present results of an empirical investigation and comparison of housing supply in three rapidly growing countries: Malaysia, Thailand, and Korea. These countries offer three contrasting examples of different approaches to development control. Korea has relatively strict control of housing supply. Thailand has little effective regulation of development. Malaysia offers …
It seemed too good to be true. A recent order of the Karnataka government allowed the 650 tribal families living in a part of the Rajiv Gandhi National Park to collect minor forest produce to build homes within the forest. The order also initiated the process of setting up public …
Greece will use satellites to tackle its illegal housing problem. Under the plan, satellites will scan the country's terrain weekly to take pictures of illegal dwellings. Officials propose to focus on forests and coastal areas, which are favoured by illegal builders. With more than 1 million illegal buildings already constructed, …
Vilasrao B Salunke, father of the pani panchayat concept in the drought-prone Marathwada region in Maharashtra, has evolved quake-resistant houses in areas affected by the September 30 earthquake. Salunke, convenor of the Pune-based Earthquake Disaster Management Group, advocates ferrocement technology to build new houses on existing foundations of the recently …
NATURAL disasters may be proposed by God, but they are disposed by man. Though it may not be possible to prevent such disasters, their devastation potential can be contained, depending on the state of human preparedness and economic conditions. The earthquake in Marathwada on September 30 has once again, so …
Low-Cost Housing in Developing Countries is a simple, utilitarian and extremely readable book. There is little new in the discussions on appropriate technology, which includes discussions on the economic constraints of the developing world, setting up of housing research priorities, and a well-written section on South-South cooperation in housing. Notwithstanding …
Mud housing enthusiasts received a blow recently when the Delhi High Court dismissed a writ petition by the Mud Village Society (MVS), staking claim to a 2.1 ha plot in East Delhi on which it intends to build a housing colony. The court held that as there was no letter …
MUD IS a versatile building material that has been used to make some extraordinary architectural marvels -- from 1,000-year-old ksars (forts) in Morocco and 6,000-year-old arches, vaults and domes in the Nile Valley to multi-storeyed houses of adobe, sun-baked bricks of mud and straw, which is the traditional building material …
IN 1988 the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) allotted 2.1 ha of land in Nand Nagri in east Delhi to the Mud Village Society (MVS) to build a model colony of environment-friendly mud-houses. However, the project seems to have run into rough weather and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has …
AMIT MITRA A LARGE number of the over 700 mud houses built by the Karnataka Housing Board (KHB) at Yelahanka near Bangalore are showing signs of falling apart. This is a major setback to a project that described by V Suresh, a HUDCO director who was then KHB chairman, once …
MUD IS no longer inferior. As a building material, it can be strengthened and stabilised to function as a viable alternative to concrete and steel. Traditional mud-building methods include mixing specified quantities of rice husk, cow dung or lime with raw earth. One of the oldest techniques is the wattle- …
ARCHITECTS hoped to establish mud as a viable building medium when they set out to build the country's first major environmentally-sound building. The mud headquarters in Delhi of Development Alternatives (DA) headquarters was built to prove a point, recalls Shrashtant Patara, a DA architect. "It was one of the first …
S GOPIKRISHNA WARRIER IN 1976, the biogas lab of the Centre for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA) was constructed on the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) campus in Bangalore with unique building blocks. They were not conventional kiln-fired bricks but stabilised mud blocks. Fourteen years …
Moving sustainability from ideas to reality and regaining the leadership of developing countries MukulSanwal[1] Prime Minister Modi’s focus on ‘lifestyles’ marks a departure from India’s 40 year old approach to global environmental concerns where India, and other developing countries, stressed poverty rather than patterns of natural resource use. At one-fourth …
Ministry of Physical Planning and Works established in 2000 during the course of the reorganization Government of Nepal. The main aim of reorganization was to bring important infrastructural development under the umbrella of a single Ministry and to harmonize the policies and bring efficiencies and effectiveness in the provision of …
