Sustainable homes.

We aim to solve the problem of homelessness that rattles the foundation of the Indian living landscape, with over 1.8 million Indians without homes. This vulnerable population lacks access to the basic necessities for a healthy life. Furthermore, according to a report published by Habitat for Humanity, “more than 73 million families in India don’t have access to decent shelter according to government data.” The primary cause for these devastating figures is the lack of affordable housing in India, which needs immediate attention in order to rehabilitate the livelihood of countless Indians. This large group of citizens are at risk - susceptible to common diseases and life-threatening safety concerns. Moreover, the potent issue that we wanted to resolve is our dependence on polluting and unsustainable materials to build homes. It is responsible for 4% of the world’s overall pollution, an alarming figure that should encourage us to pivot to green technologies.

Our solution is a container home, which is an easy-to-build, cost-efficient, and energy-efficient alternative to traditional homes. These homes are highly durable and can season any weather due to their firm, engineered walls of heavy-duty materials like metal. The containers, available in 20 feet and 40 feet, comfortably sustain families of up to 6 people. 

Furthermore, every facet of this home has been designed as a way to attain sustainability and reduce the carbon footprint that the house creates. The container homes' floors, beds, and benches are made using composite boards formed with recycled tetra packs. Additionally, each container created is equipped with a 1.5 kW solar panel setup that powers all the home's electric needs, thereby cutting down energy expenses and resource use. The home is also equipped with a composting toilet, through which human waste can be used as compost in nearby farms,  and a rainwater collection system, which makes it entirely independent and eco-friendly.

The homeless in India are the demographic we seek to help with this solution. India has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the world. These numbers include individuals living on the streets, on pathways, at train stations, and in alleys. There isn't much being done to help them, and while these numbers are already high, many argue, the true number of homeless individuals in the population is not being accurately reported, and is significantly greater than shown.

To make matters worse, the Covid-19 pandemic has imposed excessive financial and hygienic suffering for the homeless. Our solution enables them to live under hygienic conditions amid this health crisis, and reduces their susceptibility to high rates of viral transmissions. 

Additionally, our solution also tackles the catastrophic effects that homelessness has generated on the environment. Due to a scarcity of food, utensils, and water, these communities rely heavily on plastic and other single use products. There is open defecation because of lack of access to washrooms, and soil and water contamination due to a lack of information to properly dispose of waste. While developing our first prototype, we inculcated mechanisms such as solar panels and flooring made out of tetra packs to achieve sustainability. Not only does our project keep in mind the environmental wellbeing, but also incorporates the economic viability by keeping the costs to minimal. Our donation of a container house has provided a homeless family with an opportunity at a better life and we now strive to build a community of container homes, in order to provide the issue of homelessness a permanent address. 

Our team’s greatest strength is the diversity of skills that the team members entail. With our passion to tackle the well known yet overlooked problem of homelessness, our team amalgamated their experiences to help pursue our passion project. Arihant Patni, our Science Head has looked into cost effective ways to use sustainable methods when designing the structure. Having taken up courses for material sciences, he examined the wastage of shipping containers and was determined to find an alternate purpose for them. Furthermore, in our effort to make the container home completely sustainable, he suggested and engineered the usage of recycled tetra packs as the base structure of the home’s floor. Contacting people that could aid in providing access to these shipping containers, Arihant has helped Project Gharana become reality. Preet Agarwal, our Marketing and Merchandising Head looked over all the logistics during the construction of the prototype. Having her own business, her communication skills are what helped her in the exhibition of the idea to potential investors. Consequently, she was able to persuade the head of AU Finance bank India to invest in our project. Hence, by planning the product strategy, she managed to bring together all the factors that contributed to making Project Gharana possible. Navya Sharma, our Design Head, developed the blueprints of the house. Having gained professional training from various workshops and editorial courses, she encapsulates the essence of the project through her documentation and videography skills. Forming 3D graphical representations of the house, she helped us in detecting potential flaws and came up with features that help eradicate the same. Our dream of constructing a community of shipping container homes wouldn’t be possible without her impressive designing skills. Anhat Makkar, our Research and Legal Head , was the person who discovered the cause of the project in the very first place. During her extensive research, she was able to analyse and discern the immense magnitude of homelessness that ails our country, and was determined to find an effective solution for this problem. With her passion for legal studies and her substantial experience in volunteering with several lawyers, she was able to discover the difficulty with establishing a house without registered properties. That’s when she came up with the solution of attaching wheels to the shipping containers, making them mobile, and hence making the design more pragmatic and flexible. In a nutshell, we, the team of Project Gharana, consider it our responsibility, as young leaders, to ensure all individuals have access to every resource and opportunity to rehabilitate and lead a good life, regardless of their economic status. 

With our first home fully constructed and functioning, our solution is currently serving a family of four. This family was previously homeless in the city of Jaipur, and now is comfortably inhabiting our container home.

Despite the fact that its legal, technical and economic aspects are assessed feasible, we anticipate potential challenges with the scalability and marketability of Project Gharana. We envision the project to make a notable impact on the issue of large-scale homelessness. This plan necessitates producing these homes in large quantities while garnering the funds and enthusiastic participation from each stakeholder. This is where our intention of applying to solve comes in.

It is to ensure quality, durability and sustainability of the homes during the scaling process that we seek to collaborate with industry experts and experienced social entrepreneurs through MIT Solve. By doing so, we hope to gain a profound understanding of large-scale production processes and the industrial and mechanical techniques necessary for successful execution. Through MIT Solve, we reckon our team can learn to come up with creative and innovative methods to effectively market the project’s benefits to its target audience and hence drive the broad impact that we plan to create.

Project Gharana looks not only at how to improve the lives of the inhabitants of container homes, but also meets the requirement for homes to be integrated into existing urban ecosystems. We believe that no other solution to tackling the issue of homelessness, especially in India, has studied the varying harmful environmental impacts that the current living situations have and actively tries to overcome them through a sustainability-focused project model.

The project’s sustainability-focused model is futuristic and ready for any incoming challenges of the future. Its capability to inspire a cultural shift in entrepreneurship models makes it both — socially and environmentally focused. With the coming climate challenges for our society, we hope Project Gharana allows leaders in architecture, environmental design, and urban planning to adopt an ecologically cyclical model which borrows from waste products and reintegrates them into socially useful initiatives.

We have been working on this project since July 2021, and will continue to work on various aspects of it indefinitely. With our first container home fully constructed and housing a family, our goal for the next year is to make 15 more such homes and expand our impact. In the next five years, we intend on introducing Gharana 2.0. Within this new phase of our project, we will build a whole community of 50 double-storey container homes consisting of clinic and emergency treatment centers, learning centers, and IT centers- all made out of the same end-of-life shipping containers. With a sample 3D design of one of five colonies ready, we have already kick-started this process. We plan on attaining the required funding for this by taking help from government grants, as well as through our tie up with AU finance bank.

We have been working on this project since July 2021, and will continue to work on various aspects of it indefinitely. With our first container home fully constructed and housing a family, our goal for the next year is to make 15 more such homes and expand our impact. In the next five years, we intend on introducing Gharana 2.0. Within this new phase of our project, we will build a whole community of 50 double-storey container homes consisting of clinic and emergency treatment centers, learning centers, and IT centers- all made out of the same end-of-life shipping containers. With a sample 3D design of one of five colonies ready, we have already kick-started this process. We plan on attaining the required funding for this by taking help from government grants, as well as through our tie up with AU finance bank.

The initial measure of our progress is the indicator that determines the comfortable housing of the family in the container home, enabling them to maintain an acceptable and respectable standard of living. Another key indicator of our process will be the replicability of our sustainable concept. The time and capital required for the installation of the numerous container homes would act as a reflection of the efficiency of our project and its feasibility in the long run.

2050 version 1: Trapped in the cycle of poverty, half of the population are exposed to detrimental health risks . With lack of education and access to sanitation, the living standard of the economy worsens and income disparity augments. 

2050 version 2: A community of container homes accommodates families that lack privileges. Clinics, schools, hospitals: with access to proper healthcare and education within the colony of container homes, the homeless will be enabled to live above the poverty line. 

Our definition of change encompasses making version 2 a reality. We aim to make Project Gharana the solution that paves the way for the homeless to lead safe and healthy lives. A change in their living standards is necessary, however it should not come at the cost of environmental deterioration. Project Gharana’s solution of building container homes for people from underprivileged backgrounds would have a significant impact on the twin problems of homelessness and unsustainable housing by incorporating recycling and eco-friendly measures. From procurement of the containers to designing provisions for solar power and effective waste collection in the house itself, we strive to bring a revolutionary change in the housing landscape of India.

As students who belong from various fields and interdisciplinary backgrounds such as technology, design, and research, we were inspired to find a durable, cost-effective and climate-adaptive solution to homelessness in my community. Cargotecture is the latest in innovative, community-minded architectural solutions to housing shortages. Our solution involves repurposing shipping containers at the end of their life cycle into safe, energy-efficient homes for the underprivileged. We discussed our goals with our school engineer, and together we decided to use materials that would be easy to source and facilitate suitable temperature regulation in agreement with India’s climate. 

The blueprint consisted of welding a metal frame on the metal walls of the container along with glasswool insulation of walls where foam was placed to regulate the temperatures. For us, the home needed to be flexible enough to incorporate mechanisms for the collection, disposal and efficient reuse of wastewater, as well as be comfortable for its inhabitants. We provided separate white water, gray water and black water tanks for fresh, collected, and waste water to be disposed of, respectively. We also used novel materials such as recycled flooring composite made of tetra packs for the flooring, beds, and couch. For a reliable source of energy to power all appliances in the house, we installed a 1.5kW solar panel system. 

The biggest challenges to finding solutions to housing is scalability in terms of cost as well as quantity, and safety: the shipping container homes we conceptualized on AUTOCAD and Sketchup in collaboration with architects from Mumbai-based architecture firms, utilize concepts of sustainable housing and efficient waste management. Once the prototype of an outer structure for our first container home was planned, we oversaw the carpentry work in the interiors, helping with cement board paneling and making cupboards, kitchen counters, installing flooring, and painting. 

The crux of our technology lies in catering to the needs of the marginalized; as most of these communities tend to have migrating labor with large families; our shipping container homes integrate features of maximum occupancy with privacy and exclusive space due to their module and mobile nature. The benefits of shipping container homes are far too many to ignore, and we genuinely believe that with the unprecedented growth in global trade, we may have found a technological miracle hidden in plain sight.

Gharana aims to rehabilitate and provide housing to low income communities, with the mission of equity at its heart. The core idea is holistic and multifocal empowerment that facilitates a structure, system, and ultimately, a world, wherein each individual feels welcomed and supported. As a result, with the aim of providing housing to those from low income backgrounds, we aim to center their perspectives and their viewpoints in our functionalities, vying to create homes that will actually address the issues faced by those we wish to help. Further, the team at Gharana is diverse, with a 1:3 gender ratio. We value the diversity of viewpoints this adds to our operations and are deeply committed to having our project reflect inclusivity and equity in all its operations.

Project Gharana revolves around the understanding that homelessness is not a personal problem but a social one. The lack of stable housing - and the benefits that come with it - not only prevent individuals from leading fulfilling lives but also prevent them from contributing holistically to the further development of the community. It is for this reason that Project Gharana does not charge the people it houses – treating them as beneficiaries rather than customers.

Our value proposition is our effort to incorporate sustainability into the construction of a carbon footprint free house. In order to accomplish this, we worked with environmentally friendly mechanisms such as usage of solar panels for electricity generation.

Additionally, we finance the development of the container homes by relying on partners in society to power Project Gharana. After the completion of our pilot project in early 2022, we secured funding from AU Small Finance, a domestic private-sector bank in India. By teaming up with them and collaborating with the Urban Ministry of India, Project Gharana now has the opportunity to build an entire community, complete with a learning centre, public restrooms and a mobile clinic.

The financial viability is what guarantees the project sustainable and feasible in terms of its container homes. With the project cost of approximately 2.20 lakh, the homes can be constructed within a budget for private residents, corporate entities and even the government. To initiate the construction of the first container home, we began by preparing a budget by raising an amount up to INR 4.5 lakhs on Ketto. Next, we are hoping to receive support from AU Small Finance for building a community of container homes, an entity which is with us to support us to build a community of future container homes. Our ultimate objective is to establish a formal working relationship with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs of the Government of India. This will allow the project to attain full financial sustainability. Until then, we are confident that commercial investments in the project and continued crowdfunding efforts will enable Project Gharana to remain afloat and thrive.

Financing Project Gharana has been a demanding task that required significant time and effort. To raise the initial capital for the project, we established a fundraiser on Ketto, a crowdfunding platform. This endeavor enabled us to gather INR 450,000 (approximately $6000), which was crucial in launching the project. We utilized these funds to procure raw materials and cover freight charges. In addition, AU Small Finance Bank, an Indian commercial bank, provided commercial funding, further supplementing the funds raised through crowdfunding.