WALL AND ROOF ELEMENTS FOR DWELLING UNITS_ IN. HILLY REGIONS USING LOCAL MATERIALS

Abstract

Housing is a basic need of human beings. The problem of housing is assuming alarming proportion with the passage of time in the developing countries. The recent phenominal rise of price of building materials and construction costs have stood in the way of providing cheap houses for the millions of the people. Further, the hilly regions gave different geographical and environmenta3 conditions as compared to plains, which require proper consideration for specific problems associated with hills and therefore, need to incorporate local material's for construction of dwelling units. The use of local materials such as bamboo, widely available in many parts of India, has not been scientifically fully utilized as building materials. In the present investigation an attempt has been made to develop bamboo as reinforcing material of cement and mortar matrix for walling and roofing elements-, precast lean concrete blocks and RCC slab reinforced with welded wire mesh as walling and roofing elements for heavy rainfall and snow bound areas. The load carrying capacity, in impact, static transverse and lateral loading of bamboo based slabs, RCC slabs and compressive strength of precast concrete blocks are investigated and satisfactory results are observed. The results of investigation point out that local material such as bamboo, stone fragments, river sand etc, can be advantageously utieized for wall and roof construction, particularlly in hilly regions. The construction costs were observed to be low and the construction techniques are very much simple, requiring no specialeKpertise and can be done on "Do—it—yourself" basis by imparting short initial training