“We realised that nature is truly abundant,” Malik added.

Designers, planners and architects are helping them to build minimalist homes with primarily mud, but also other locally-sourced materials including bamboo, recycled wood, lime, baked bricks, cow dung, wheat husks and stones.

Although people in Indian villages traditionally lived in mud houses, many people as far back as the 1960s and 1970s started shifting to concrete houses, often considered a sign of socio-economic mobility.

But some urban Indians are now opting to live in mud houses costing 1,500-3,500 rupees (US$18-42) per square foot to build, say architects, and can be up to 30 per cent cheaper than concrete houses.

The average price of a flat in a high-rise in the outskirts of Delhi is about 4000-6000 rupees (US$54-73) per square foot.

The maintenance cost of a mud house is almost nominal.

Architect and designer Anujna Nutan Dnyaneshwar, who lives in the western Indian city of Pune, said that many tech and entertainment professionals who had earned plenty of money by their early 40s were now choosing “healthy” and “modest” living.

She said Covid-19 was the turning point for many to make a “humble” new and greener beginning by living in mud houses, having faced bereavement and job losses during the pandemic.

Savneet Kaur is the chief architect of Imarat Architects in northwest India’s city of Chandigarh, where her firm promotes eco-friendly construction.

Kaur, who lives in an eco-friendly flat herself, said she builds them for contemporary lifestyles, ensuring an ecological balance in line with individual requirements. Her ultimate aim is to see mud houses go from “alternative to mainstream architecture”.

Kaur, 51, worked for 12 years with the late Delia Narayan, also known as Didi Contractor, a self-taught American architect with a background in art, famous for her award-winning decades of work in India using materials like mud and bamboo.

It was Didi who made the local vernacular architecture in Kangra acceptable and popular among the elite by adding her artistic vision to the local technique of building mud homes in the 1990s, Kaur said.

Mud houses promote “healthy living” because their walls filter and clean the air, said Kaur. She added that in Chandigarh, where building laws that protect the character and landscape of the city do not allow such homes, she uses a variety of environmentally-friendly techniques, like solar passive design. This means walls, floors and windows collect and distribute solar energy to give heat in the winter, but dismiss solar heat in the summer.

Kaur also uses filler slab construction, whereby particular parts of concrete slabs have materials in them like clay pots and hollow concrete blocks, which is better for the planet but has no adverse effect on the building’s safety.

Another ‘green’ technique is vermiculite (a kind of mineral) plastering, a far more effective insulator than regular plaster.

Tamil Nadu-based architect Lakshmi Swaminathan said constructing and living in a mud house is part and parcel of responsible living. Such homes reduce the carbon footprint of the building, and using materials which can be part of a larger ecological cycle is her main aim in each project.

“I am trying to add a new vocabulary to the existing vernacular architecture,” Swaminathan said, referring to domestic and indigenous building methods as opposed to public structures.

Swaminathan, who also trained under Didi follows the contractor’s construction techniques, like adding paper pulp to the second coat of internal mud plaster. This makes the material less likely to crack. She adds a by-product of linseed oil to the external mud plaster, to help make outside walls water resistant.

Not everyone does the same, though, when building ‘green’ homes. Architect Aditya Singh, who lives in a mud thatch, works for the Gujarat-based Hunnarshala Foundation, an NGO which designed and planned sustainable housing after earthquakes in Iran, Afghanistan, and India.

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Indonesian women turn waste plastic into construction bricks

Indonesian women turn waste plastic into construction bricks

For his plaster mixture, he uses lime in araish and kodi marble, which include jaggery (cane sugar), fenugreek (a plant), and uses natural gum made of tree sap and marble dust to help make a home’s outside walls waterproof.

There are also different building techniques to work with. For example, the cob technique, in which hand-formed mud lumps are mixed with sand, straw or dung then piled next to and on top of each other to build walls, is one of the most common ways to make a mud house.

“The breathable nature of the mud walls makes them an efficient insulator, enabling them to maintain comfortable temperature indoors, in cold and hot weather,” said Singh, who built five mud homes last year.

Singh said that it can take two months to two years to build a mud house. Construction depends on several factors, including the building’s size, building technique, weather conditions and how many builders are involved, he added.

03:05

Indonesian women turn waste plastic into construction bricks

Indonesian women turn waste plastic into construction bricks

Singh said that in many villages in India, it is common to see mud houses which have lasted more than 70 years, spanning generations of families.

In hilly areas, he said, where there is a scarcity of good soil, the wattle and daub method – in use for thousands of years – is used to reduce the amount of mud. Vertical wooden or bamboo stakes are woven with horizontal branches or split bamboo, then slathered with clay or mud. “These houses are naturally earthquake resistant,” he added.

Hundreds of miles away, back in Bangalore, Malik continues her life rethinking living, learning and livelihoods, to align with nature.

She grows food, harvests water and uses dried twigs and branches as fuel for her woodstove and the residual ash to wash dishes. She also uses recycled water for her plants and composts food scraps.

The worms from the compost system, leftover food and azollas, a type of plant, “make a nutritious diet for our two chickens, who scratch and turn the soil the whole day and keep pests in check”, said Malik, who believes wholeheartedly in teaching the next generation to be responsible citizens.

She added: “We have to take care of our surroundings and our planet, just as we take care of our bodies.”