Comparative Study of Indian Village Houses and Lowcost Engineered Houses using Earthen Meshed Panels

The scarcity of affordable and easily constructed houses is contributing to the cycle of poverty and under developed status of many people of rural area. It is present need to provide lowcost housing technology for the population staying in the rural areas of our country. Everyone cannot afford therein forced concrete houses in rural areas. So, we have to provide such house that poorest can afford without sacrificing on strength, performance and life of structure. Majority of houses in rural area are earthen or made using straw. These houses present in rural areas has many problems like leakage in rainy season, high maintenance, life of these houses is less, unstable against high wind currents, earthquake resistant capacity is minimum, aesthetic appearance is not good. These problems can be minimized by providing lowcost earthquake resistant housing technology using locally available materials. So, low cost engineered house can be constructed using soil, GI wire mesh as confinement (to increase performance as well) and plaste redusing cement mortar. This study will also focus on different connections between wall to wall panels, slab to wall panel and wall to footing. The lowcost earthquake resistant earthen house can have advantages like more earthquake resistant, pleasant aesthetic appearance, Low maintenance and more life (upto 50 years), fast and easy construction with reliability, use of engineering materials like GI mesh, cement is limited to 10% - 15%. The detail study of different methods of construction of rural houses is done and compared with lowcost engineered houses using earthen meshed panels, to provide full fledge house (400square feet) with best performance in lowcost (within 1 lakh) to rural people.