Sankar Radhakrishnan

Thiruvananthapuram , March 2

WHAT is considered the `alternative' building industry today will be the norm in the next five to six years, says Mr Hariharan, Director, Biodiversity Conservation India Ltd (BCIL).

Already, there is a great deal of interest in `alternative' housing, which essentially calls for sensitive stewardship of land, he said. However, in a few years time, mainstream builders will be forced to adopt sustainable building practices. This will happen because builders who use `alternative' construction technologies will be able to build homes that offer a better quality of life at prices that are on par with what the conventional building industry offers, Mr Hariharan said.

At the same time, there is a need to make sustainable housing technology more affordable and to remove the misconception that houses built using `alternative' construction techniques will not last, he says. "The day we reach a point where we can build a house at Rs 300 a square foot, while following our core values, we are winners," he adds.

The Bangalore-based, not-for-profit BCIL is, itself, in the process of completing work on three sustainable housing projects and is committed to building about 400 such homes in the next 30 months.

The company's construction philosophy is based on four principles — use of energy-efficient building material, no import of water from outside the site, generating green energy from within the building complex and biomass planning.

For instance, the company has adopted a policy that its housing complexes will be responsible for all the waste they generate. So plastic waste generated by the housing complexes built by BCIL is passed on to a recycler who uses it to make a compound used to surface roads.

Many traditional systems and technologies, especially in construction, are extremely eco-friendly, he said.

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