Architecture Of Hope

Around the town of Morvi in Gujarat, the fields are drab and mostly, nowadays, show no traces of the plough. Sometimes they are strewn with rubble where, until the earthquake that celebrated last Republic Day, villages stood. Very few livestock can be seen. Grey with dust, hunched as though exhausted, the occasional trees, under hot breaths of wind, mutter like resentful refugees. The shrivelled rivers do not seem to move. At noon the crimson eye of the sun squints down at a landscape in stasis. The rains will soon come, but the villagers dread them; they may spread further chaos when they do.

We've come from villages reduced to rubble. In their narrow lanes, the debris of human habitations has piled up higher than a man's head. Former inhabitants live among the ruins, or in tents supplied as relief. They seem to await a miracle. So far, people have come with promises, none of which have been kept. The state government, resolved on inanition in the days immediately after the earthquake, firmly pursues this policy. The ngos and private firms who adopted villages have not yet had time to rebuild them.

Near Morvi, a swami has erected a small settlement of prefabricated houses that won't stand much stress. Some rich patels are trying to patch up their wrecked houses, or to rebuild them on the same collapsible lines as before. The houses are some distance from each other, "for caste reasons", Vishal Jadeja tells me. "Caste is very important here," he says. "Very few people want their villages relocated, because they love the land. But they may want people of lower caste, or Muslims, excluded from villages that are rebuilt. We can only try and sort it out."

Down another dirt road, we arrive at Ravapar Nadhi village. It once had 573 inhabitants, including a Muslim family, and 14 Hindu temples dedicated to various deities. Unlike the wrecked hamlets nearby, the place has returned to life. People are putting final touches to a collection of 108 small, unattractive houses built to survive cyclones and earthquakes. They were put up in 30 days and on April 19 the people moved into their new homes. Children wave as we enter the village; adults smile at us under the sullen sun.

Vishal, at least in his Mumbai incarnation, is a gregarious young man with a lively social calendar. Ever since the temblor, he's been at Morvi, working for the Mayur Foundation to rehabilitate villagers. Ravapar Nadhi, he tells me, was named after an ancestor of his, who ruled Morvi state. "That wasn't why we chose it to be our example of how a village could be built quickly, cheaply. It was simply a badly-damaged community that needed help." The village is on the banks of the Macchu river, which in 1979 flooded and devastated the area. "I was only a kid then."

His aunt Purna, clad in a yellow sari, remarks: "That was when the foundation was started, to help the local people. We felt it was our duty." Its trustees are members of the former royal family: former Maharani Vijaya Kunverba; her daughters Meera, Maya, Uma and Purna; and her grandchildren Lia, Dubash and Vishal. They've been greatly helped by Vasant Pandit, a young man whose mobile phone seems as much part of him as his pigtail. Pandit is the secretary of the Deendayal Research Institute, and an old friend of the Morvis.

Purna is married to the Honourable Garech Browne, and lives in Ireland. "I was able to collect £70,000 there. We're spending part of it on the project village.We're also building a hospital at Morvi, and starting a fully-equipped mobile clinic." She wanders away with a local photographer, towards where the light, hollow blocks of which the houses are made are being manually manufactured. "I need to send pictures back to Ireland," she says. "There's been a lot of sympathy there."

In a building intended to be a marriage hall, we shelter from the sun. Pandit is with us, as is village sarpanch Shaktisinh. He sports an aggressive moustache and a red shirt. Also present is an old man from a tribe of cattleherders, Kodagova, and several other people who watch and listen, but do not speak. "The district commissioner formed a committee of villagers," Pandit says. "These people are on it. There's one from every caste in the village, and also one woman, the schoolteacher. We've worked closely with them, consulted them in everything we've done."

He has written a booklet in English about the model village. This describes in detail the cheapness of the scheme and the speed it was executed at. "All the labour came from the village," he says, "except for the masons. We formed a team of local planners and architects before we started work. We didn't know much about building, neither did the villagers. But we respected the villagers' suggestions and were able to help them." Kodagova, who has white whiskers and kind eyes, says: "Only these people helped us." The foundation invited L.K. Advani to come and see what it had done. Pandit's booklet had attacked the government and the ngos of inefficiency and of having no guidelines. "In his speech, Mr Advani held up a copy of my booklet and said the government would tell ngos to use what it said as their guidelines. He said he had thought the project had originated in Japan and was expensive. He found it was Indian and cheap. He said he wouldn't have believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes."

Then Shaktisinh made a short speech. He said the villagers had had differences before. But they'd all suffered equally when the village was destroyed and worked together to rebuild it. Now, he said, all differences would be forgotten and the village would be happy for the next century. I doubted this. But when I looked at the weathered faces of the villagers, who hadn't been paid to smile but were, I felt elated myself. In this small, dusty, unappealing village, something remarkable had been achieved. Only a few people knew about it, but I was glad to be one of them.