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Addressing the housing needs of India’s poor
Rakhi Mehra (MBA 2009) is enabling a growing number of India’s 82 million urban poor households to have structurally safe and well-ventilated homes through the enterprise she cofounded, micro Home Solutions (mHS) City Lab. Winner of the Social Enterprise Fellowship in 2011, mHS emphasizes increased community engagement, design, and affordability as the key elements of improving housing conditions for the poor. It provides an alternative to traditional models of mass-housing developments that lead to social exclusion.
“We envisioned mHS as an action-research initiative, incubating pilots for experimentation while undertaking research and consultancies to influence policies on urbanization, disaster risk reduction, and social housing,” says Mehra. mHS pilots include modular shelters for homeless, bundling housing finance and technical assistance to low-income households, and designing master classes for construction workers. The organization is currently exploring international collaborations.
“Government policies should foster the self-construction market and see it as a solution to the growing housing crisis. We believe self-construction is the most viable model with the ability to scale up without massive subsidies, as it is owner-driven and bottom-up,” says Mehra, who founded mHS with her husband, architect Marco Ferrario.
(Published April 2014)
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