BEND IT LIKE BAMBOO: MEET THE HYDERABAD COUPLE BUILDING ECO-FRIENDLY HOUSES WITH THE PLANT

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By Nitin B.onMay. 06, 2017in Environment and Ecology
Editorial Note: Building with local Bamboo can be sustainable but ‘all amenities’ might not be so. Trans-oceanic Export might be highly energy-intensive, with a large carbon footprint – far from being eco-friendly.
An eco-friendly bamboo house costs just 2.5 lakhs and provides livelihood, too.
A newly married couple in Hyderabad hunts for a sofa. It leads them to a future they never imagined.
Meet Prashant Lingam and Aruna Kappagantula, the brains behind Bamboo House India which constructs eco-friendly houses – not made of bricks, cement and steel, but entirely made out of bamboo.
Besides promoting sustainable living, the houses also provide employment to several farmers and artisans, who are involved in the process, from growing the crop, to building the structure.
“Bamboo is a great substitute for wood. There is so much potential in it. While normal trees that are cut down take 20 to 25 years to grow, bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world, and can grow almost an inch every day,” says Prashant, who founded Bamboo House India, with his wife Aruna.
“The tensile strength of bamboo is even higher than steel,” Prashant notes.
This means that a piece of bamboo can take more tension and pressure exerted on it, than a piece of steel with the same thickness.
While the company has been making a name for itself locally, and across India, their journey was not always so smooth.
How it all began
“I married Aruna in 2006, and that’s when the idea came up by chance. She wanted to buy an eco-friendly sofa set, and we looked all across the city (Hyderabad) but found nothing. We went on the Internet, and found that there was some bamboo furniture being sold abroad,” recalls Prashant.
He goes on to add, “We really liked the furniture and began looking for it. After almost a month, we landed up at Katlamara in Tripura on the Indo-Bangladesh border, just to buy furniture.”
Prashant says that the visit was an eye-opening experience, as the entire village was filled with bamboo and every person’s livelihood depended directly or indirectly on it.
“So, we decided to help them, and came up with the idea of building bamboo houses. We saw that people were already doing it in places like Latin America, and began doing a bit of research,” Prashant says.
However, the couple faced opposition from their families, who were sceptical of the proposal.
The duo was in their third month of marriage, and Prashant was making good money from a commercial venture he had started, while Aruna was planning to do a PhD.
Despite their families’ disapproval, Prashant says that they were insistent, and decided to travel extensively across the country, from the north east, to parts of Andhra, Telangana and Kerala, to study bamboo.
“After a year or so, we had a basic idea. We leased out a small piece of land for our infrastructure in 2008. We also hired 20 artisans from Adilabad, who used to make baskets,” Prashant narrates.
“However, we missed out something big in our excitement,” he rues.
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