India is home to a sea of homeless and people who have structures that provide more risks than any level of sustainability. So designers are interested in new possibilities that leverage what is financially, energy, and infrastructure pragmatic.
Vijay Govindrajan of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business with Christian Sarkar, marketing expert issued a challenge in the Harvard Business Review blog to come up with a house for the poor. As per an article in the Economist – They laid down a few simple guidelines. The houses should be built of mass-produced materials tough enough to protect their inhabitants from a hostile world. They should be equipped with the basics of civilized life, including water filters and solar panels. They should be “improvable”, so that families can adapt them to their needs. And they should cost no more than $300. A $300 house since Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank had once calculated, that the average value of the houses of people who have just escaped poverty is $370.
If the first step here is to stop thinking of quality of life for everyone on the planet as impossible, what is the next step?
