National
Masons trained to build quake-resilient homes
Gun Bahadur Nepali, 48, is busy constructing his neighbour’s house at Rainas Municipality in Lamjung these days.Aash Gurung
Gun Bahadur Nepali, 48, is busy constructing his neighbour’s house at Rainas Municipality in Lamjung these days. He has been earning his living as a mason for the past 30 years, but did not know how to build earthquake-resilient homes until recently.
After the devastating earthquake of April 25, 2015, Nepali and other masons in the village were trained by Cottage and Small Industries Development Committee (CSIDC) to build earthquake-resistant homes.
“For the last 30 years we had been employing the same traditional techniques to build homes. After the earthquake, we learnt that by applying certain changes in our building techniques, a house will not collapse easily,” Nepali said.
Pitam Bahadur Tamang, who is also involved in a construction of quake-damaged house, has found the training helpful. He has been implementing the knowledge he learnt in the training to build new homes.
“Safety was not something we gave a lot of thought to while building houses in the past. But from now on we are always thinking about the ways to make a house resilient to disasters like earthquake,” Tamang said. Nearly 800 houses in Rainas were destroyed by the earthquake.
Narayan Prasad Gautam of CSIDC said the Department of Cottage and Small Industries had organised the training to start a practice of building safe and resilient homes, especially in rural parts where safety regulations are seldom followed. Even those people who had no prior experience of building houses are being trained thus creating job opportunity for many people in the earthquake-affected areas.
“We also provide different building tools and implements to the training participants,” Gautam said. Rajendra Mishra, deputy executive director of the department, said around 2,000 people in the earthquake-hit districts were being trained to build earthquake-resilient homes.