Living Paradigms is a series about what we can learn from the customs and cultural practices of others when it comes to solving problems. It is sponsored by Wonderstruck.
Umananda Pathuri keeps a watchful eye on his eight-year-old daughter while his wife naps with their toddler. Outside their house in Nikori, a village in one of northeast India’s most flood-prone districts in the state of Assam, flood waters are rising and the rains are incessant. “We’re the Mising, Assam’s river people, so of course the child can swim,” says the 42-year-old. “We’re used to floods. But they now seem unpredictable, more treacherous somehow.”
Pathuri and his family live in a low-lying area near the Dhansiri river, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, where floods are an annual feature. He is one of a handful of remaining masons in the village who build raised bamboo houses, known locally as chang ghars. With walls made of porous grass mats and stilts that protect the house when the river overflows its banks, these lightweight structures are perfectly designed for this disaster-prone region, as became acutely apparent in 2017 when a flood destroyed over 4,000 houses and damaged over 100,000. The few homes that remained relatively unscathed in the flood-affected areas were traditional chang ghars.
Umananda Pathuri outside his home in Nikori village. Credit: Umananda Pathuri.
For centuries chang ghars have offered a low tech and low cost solution to flood-resilient housing in the region. Indeed, such homes are common across the world’s low-lying areas that are located near water. Amazonian communities in Brazil build houses that float, or are on stilts, to stay dry during the annual flood. In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, the height of the stilts under traditional bamboo and wood houses, or nhà sàn, is determined by previous flooding peaks.
Yet in the last decade, the flooding pattern in Assam, once so familiar to Pathuri’s tribe, has changed. Floods are more frequent, more erratic and more prolonged than before, and the outcome has been a growing urgency for the chang ghars to adapt to meet the contemporary challenges putting the Mising’s lives and livelihoods at risk.
Every year, different areas get flooded and the river does not recede as easily as it used to,” says Pathuri, adding that Nikori and neighboring villages now often remain waterlogged from the end of June sometimes all the way to October. “The bamboo stilts and mud foundations of our traditional chang ghars were designed to cope with floods that lasted a short time, not this kind of prolonged water-logging.”
Enter architects Anshu Sharma and Manu Gupta, co-founders of the Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS), an Indian NGO that has been working on disaster management and mitigation in the Indian subcontinent since 1994. Changing weather patterns combined with an increasing amount of construction on floodplains and the extensive building of embankments on riverbanks — which prevent flood water from returning to the river — are making people more vulnerable to rather than more resilient to floods. Add in the trend of locals increasingly opting for concrete homes (not therefore on stilts) and the result is what Gupta calls “the perfect recipe for disaster” in Assam.
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In response, SEEDS started working with local masons to develop an improved chang ghar design that required less maintenance and lasted longer than the original design, while retaining the same look, ventilation and height that are well adapted to the local geography and terrain. In 2018, they trained about 20 bamboo masons to implement this new design on 80 model houses in a project funded by Godrej Group, an Indian conglomerate.
Amrit Morang and Pathuri, both residents of Nikori village, were among them.
“The first innovation we learned was to set the stilts in a concrete base rather than directly in the mud,” Morang recounts. “The SEED trainers also taught us to treat the bamboo stilts with a chemical to make them last longer. This ensured that the house was able to survive more waterlogging than the traditional version.” This chang ghar 2.0 design also includes a flexible joinery system that allows homeowners to raise the floor even higher if necessary, and cross-bracing bamboo supports to make the structure capable of withstanding movements caused by floods and earthquakes, bearing in mind that this region falls in a high seismic activity zone.
The chang ghar 2.0 may cost more to build but annual repair costs are generally much lower. Credit: SEEDS India.
“They also taught us to use locally available cane to tie the bamboo, which is cheaper and much stronger,” Pathuri says. “Also, traditionally, we always peeled the outer layer of bamboo before using it for construction – SEEDS told us this was unnecessarily time-consuming and made the bamboo prone to termite attacks.”
Constructed with sturdy, local bamboo, the chang ghar 2.0 costs about $800 to build, about 20 percent more than a traditional chang ghar. The mainframe of the house takes merely a week to construct, however, and annual repair costs are generally much lower.
“While our traditional Mising stilt huts needed repairs every year, the SEEDs design has lasted about eight years, needing only minor maintenance,” Pathuri says. He used the new design to build his own house in 2018 following the destruction of his previous stilted hut in the 2017 floods. Given the annual repairs his old home required, he says he was “ready for a change”.
Still, some of the people of Nikori and other flood-prone areas in Assam hesitated to adopt this design. The government classified the new homes as kutcha, or temporary, as they were constructed from bamboo, thatch, grass and reeds, all materials with a shorter life. Kutcha houses not only have a lower social cachet compared to “modern” concrete houses, they also cannot be easily used as collateral for bank loans.
Though the SEEDS project in Assam ended in 2018, the NGO tried yet another chang ghar design upgrade in 2021.
With donor partner PricewaterhouseCoopers India, SEEDS architects designed a chang ghar that would last longer and support a wider variety of raw materials (grass, reeds, wood, or other easily sourced materials) that could perhaps be more easily replicable in other flood-prone geographies. This structure is larger than the chang ghar 2.0, and was specifically designed to serve as a flood relief shelter in Nikori. Both Pathuri and Morang were part of the team of masons who built it.
“We used the same bamboo superstructure design as before, but replaced bamboo stilts with reinforced concrete columns to give the building greater stability and load-bearing strength,” Morang explains. The shelter is designed to house up to 10 flood-affected families at a time, and has also been regularly used as a community activity space since it was completed in 2021.
A closer look at the chang ghar 3.0 design with concrete stilts. In dry weather, the space under the stilts is used for storage and tethering livestock. Credit: Geetanjali Krishna.
Thanks to its durability and greater resilience to floods, people across Assam are replicating this latest design. Pathuri says that there is a steady demand for it, and that similar houses are being made wherever there are populations of Mising people, mostly along the banks of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. “In Kaziranga National Park, which is over 20 miles from here, large hotels have been built using this design,” he says. He estimates that he has received over 60 commissions for this new chang ghar variant.
Morang has also replicated this new design in over 60 dwellings and a couple of schools, too. He says that the increased uptake of the chang ghar with concrete stilts has partially been due to the increased allocations under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, a government scheme that gives INR 1.3 lakh (about US$1,500) to low-income rural families to build their houses. SEEDS has also replicated this design in another flood and typhoon-prone region in the east Indian state of Odisha, over 1,000 miles away. But it has not spread organically there in the way that it has in Assam — perhaps, as the chief of programs at SEEDS, Yezdani Rahman, points out, because it is not a “traditional practice” there.
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In Assam, however, where these humble fishermen’s huts on stilts are so emblematic of the lush landscape, they are doing much more than just keeping Morang, Pathuri and other Mising people dry. They demonstrate how principles of vernacular architecture can help Indian towns and villages adapt to climate change. A July 2025 World Bank report states that building flood-resilient infrastructure in India could save $5 billion in flood-related losses by 2030, and $30 billion by 2070.
Meanwhile, Morang, who built his own house using the new specs from SEEDS, is happy with the outcome. “My house has weathered long seasons of flood, and its concrete foundation and stilts are still going strong,” he says. “Now, whenever anyone asks me to build a traditional chang ghar, I add these changes to build a structure that will truly be a refuge in times of flood and rain.”