Background
The village at Poonthura is a large settlement made up of a series of settlement clusters, predominantly comprising of tribal people whose main occupation is fishing. It is situated near the coast, with a series of backwaters cutting across the housing clusters. The people of the village are from various religious backgrounds, who have settled in communal groups. However, it has a majority of Christian population and, hence, has received a lot of welfare aid form the Christian missionaries.
Being a tribal society, the people are by nature insular and had a well-defined family and caste organization. Construction of housing is considered to be a community activity and, hence, the mediation of an outside architect is very difficult. Moreover, the difficult environment in which the tribals live and the limitations of their resources has led to a long-term neglect of development activities in this area.
Initiatives by Laurie Baker
The fisher folk originally lived in traditional thatch houses, which would get blown away by the cyclonic winds practically every monsoon. This would generally be followed by a pouring of relief aid and material for rehabilitation. When Mr. Baker was put in charge of the housing project he reasoned out that the amount spent every year on rehabilitation could be directly used in the construction of permanent houses, designed and oriented to counter the effects of the cyclone. The villagers were distressed by the storm situation and so the houses had to be built as quickly as possible.
Hence, with the support of the former Chief Minister, Mr. A. C. Menon, Mr. Baker proceeded to survey, design and build on newly acquired site. The attempt made by him was to overcome the inability of an outsider to comprehend the underlying patterns of a tribal group and to be able to respond to its private needs.
Initiatives by COSTFORD
This sowed the seeds of COSTFORD's relationship with this village. Over time COSTFORD has intervened in this village by way of different housing schemes. In 1996, under the decentralized planning scheme, launched by the state government, COSTFORD was given charge to provide more houses in this village. As per the procedures of the Total housing scheme, there was no tendering process for the contract and the Gram Panchayat of the village directly allotted the projects to COSTFORD.
In 1997, COSTFORD undertook the survey of the village afresh. The beneficiaries were identified and a participatory planning began. Detailed sketches were made of the various plan alternatives based on the requirements expressed by the individual house owners. They even made models to better explain the scheme to the people.
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