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Himalayan Bamboo creating a new segment
Housing the millions is a growing as a problem for Nepal. While some are homeless and need a shelter, many urban people dream of a cosy little bungalow, away from the matchbox they call “a building” situated in the middle of a jungle of concrete. Himalayan Bamboo and Wood Products (P) Ltd. (HBWP) has come up with a solution with a flexibility to suit a wide range of needs and fancies, which costs much less compared to cost of the conventional brick and mortar houses but with a life of the construction comparable to the conventional one!
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Model ex-Kamaiya house of bamboo |
When people with good finances buy a piece of land in the suburbs with the expectation of an open environment for their housing (or for a farm house), they are still unhappy because the options for making their dream house is limited to brick and mortar construction. And once the house is up, you are stuck with it as it becomes very expensive to dismantle it and construct a new one. It is also impossible to shift it to a new location. Now HBWP has come up with prefabricated housing units that primarily use bamboo as the main construction material.
The result is a drastic reduction in the cost of the house - about Rs. 600 per sq.ft. compared to the prevalent present price of Rs. 1,500 (in Kathmandu) if one uses concrete, bricks and cement. The bamboo houses will have a concrete foundation, toilets with tiling, commodes, tiled roof with a false ceiling and high class finishing, and other similar modern amenities. The walls, however, are made of bamboo supported by concrete pillars. Such houses are durable for 50 years while the brick and mortar houses last for 60-65 years, says Ajaya Mudbhary, the CEO and owner of HBWP.
The company has already started constructing such houses for the ex-Kamaiyas in the far-western Terai and the sample house has already been built, he informs. His company is under contract to construct 18 such houses and the cost for a two-roomed house is Rs. 100,000 (see photo on the top of this page).
Set up some three years ago (in 2000), HBWP has been producing and selling wooden and bamboo parquets (branded Rhino Floors and Himbamboo Floors) for fashionable and durable floorings. Apart from domestic sales, the products are being exported to India, Switzerland, Ukraine and Russia. While the domestic demand for those products was concentrated in the upper middle class and the higher-class households in the urban and semi-urban areas, their entry into housing will expand the company’s domestic business.
The idea to venture into bamboo housing came from the company’s association with INBAR (International Network for Bamboo and Rattan), an intergovernmental organisation based at Beijing, China. Nepal is one of its 30 members and Himalayan Bamboo is a corporate member. The experience of INBAR with bamboo housing in different countries was passed onto Himalayan Bamboo through Shyam Kumar Poudel, a Nepali working with INBAR and whom Mudbhary describes as one of the pioneers in bamboo housing. Poudel has working experience in India, Ghana, Ethiopia and Ecuador in bamboo housing, and currently he is fully involved in the transfer of bamboo housing technology to Nepal.
The entry into the housing business was not difficult one for the company as it required only some small additional investment for tools and machines and they already had the basic machines which were being used for the production of the parquets.
While selling the parquets, the company was in mass marketing, but now with the housing business it is more into institutional marketing. The contract for the houses for the ex-Kamaiyas was received from Resource & Environmental Conservation Society (RES- Nepal), an NGO involved in rehabilitating the Kamaiyas with financial support from Small Grant Program of Global Environment Facility GEF/UNDP and INBAR, China.
Now the company is targeting the NGOs which are working for the rehabilitation of people displaced by the ongoing conflict, the resort hotels, agencies involved in constructing school buildings, health posts, and community toilets in the villages, and contractors of big construction projects (for camp houses at construction sites).
Going by the cost analysis of the house constructed for the ex-Kamaiyas, the cost of a bamboo house could come down to as low as Rs. 350 per sq. ft.
Apart from the convenience and costs, the other marketing platform the company could use is the environmental aspect. The demand created for bamboo by this additional use is expected to encourage farmers to take up bamboo farming. Since bamboo can be grown in land useless for other crops and it can be harvested much earlier than other trees, it will help in poverty reduction as well as in maintaining the ecological balance in the Nepali hills.
The company is therefore not getting involved in bamboo farming. It wants the farmers to do that business. “We will concentrate only on processing, research and developing new products so that more and more farmers will be involved in the business as our associates, thus automatically giving the company a nationwide reach and support,” clarifies Mudbhary.
The company’s Hetauda factory is employing about 50 people though their number increases to over 100 during the main season which begins from the end of one rainy season till the beginning of the next rainy season.
This feature on SME has been sponsored by Siddhartha Bank Ltd.
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