In 2020, at the peak of the Covid pandemic, a dear friend and college senior of mine approached me with a complex problem statement: How can we build a house that weighs less than half a ton, can be moved up and down Can be made in less than 6 hours, by less than 6 people, using nothing but the simplest equipment, while also providing a dry, warm and safe place to stay. I didn’t know it at the time, but we would essentially be trying to re-imagine the entire space of relief housing for displaced refugees. For the longest time that I can remember, what really excited me about life and motivated me to wake up in the morning was the thought that I was perhaps contributing to something bigger than myself that I was not. was only effective, but could also enhance the effect. At this point, I was a little over a year into my first job as an operations manager at Procter & Gamble, and delivering challenging operating results and being away from my family while battling COVID to keep my team safe. The next month, I signed on as Chief Operating Officer at Nostos Homes.
Cramped housing in a traditional refugee camp can allow diseases to spread. In the absence of strong walls, security and privacy, it may be impossible for working family members to leave the rest alone in these units and seek employment elsewhere. The psychological trauma of losing a home and not knowing when they will have a home again can make it difficult for families to rebuild their lives. The goal of Nostos Homes was to provide a dry, warm and safe space that provides people with privacy, security and dignity as close to home as possible. For our first pilot deployment, we will build four home units and deploy them in a floodplain in western Karnataka.
The need-fulfilling idea was to create a kit that a group of people who had never seen a Nostos house before could easily assemble within a few hours without special equipment. There were several constraints that the design needed to meet, such as longevity, strength, being lightweight and, most importantly, being made of standard materials that could be found and fabricated in most medium-sized industrial set-ups. Is. We finally came up with a new design and were able to file a patent on it, something the whole team is very proud of.
Finding the right manufacturing vendor proved to be an extremely challenging task and it must have been my fiftieth call that finally led me to a vendor based in western India who was ready to take on the project. It was April 2021. Given our tight budget, transportation was the next challenge, and Sanjeev Rangaras, who is part of ITC’s top leadership and a well-known angel investor, connected us to BlackBuck, India’s largest trucking platform, which could help us. Our pilot by shipping homes to us at cost. While all of this was happening on the operational front, a large portion of my time was being spent developing future deployment opportunities for these homes. We worked with a range of organizations from Habitat for Humanity India to the state governments of Nagaland and West Bengal to find buyers for the product.
A few days before leaving for Karnataka deployment in Nov 2021, I developed high fever. It was dengue and I was advised complete rest for at least a week. This was something I refused to do, and with the help of several members of the local farming community, I got to work setting up the houses.
At this point, I realized that critical errors had been made by the vendor in manufacturing the kits of these units, and at the end of the week, only two of the four could be assembled. However, we decided to repair the houses with the help of a local machinist and set them up as planned.
The satisfaction I felt when I went up to the last house, built entirely by local people – completely without help – was unparalleled. Many of those who worked to build the four units were displaced due to seasonal floods. They all talked about not only how innovative they thought the concept was, but also that we had actually built ‘homes’ and not just shelters.
To scale up, Nostos is exploring a number of different operating models and approaches to deliver impact, from outsourced manufacturing to licensing, local manufacturing and supporting innovations in this space with grants. We claim that each such unit can provide shelter to over 32,000 people over its lifetime; The four homes we have set up on a pilot basis together can generate nights for around 130,000 people.
Since displacement is an unfortunate reality, it is important that provisions made for displaced people benefit from design innovation. My own journey with Nostos has been deeply transformative, as has been the case with the other participants. It not only gave me confidence in my abilities but also strengthened my resolve in this field. A lot can be achieved by implementing solutions for the betterment.
Rohit Sir works as an impact investor at investment firm LightRock
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