Meet Shagun Singh: She builds homes with mud

Shagun Singh left her comfortable job in Delhi to conserve the environment, and now she happily builds mud houses in Uttarakhand.

Transcript

00:00There's a mindset that we have, that mud homes, stone homes, lime homes, it's meant for the

00:11poor.

00:12I started learning farming.

00:22I started learning how to build my own house with natural materials.

00:42They thought I'm going to try it for some time and then probably go back to my career,

00:47which within a year or two, I believe everybody knew that's not going to happen and this is

00:52what I want to do.

00:59Now, POM is just one of the several natural building techniques that you can use to build

01:13your home.

01:14POM is nothing but essentially a mixture of clay, sand, straw and water.

01:21Once we mix it all together, we just straight away start building a wall system with it.

01:27You can build load-bearing homes or non-load-bearing homes and you can go a couple of floors up

01:32as well.

01:33In this mud home, you'll see there's plastering going on simultaneously over here with the

01:38same mix with which the home has been built and then we've made a nice lime paint, tuna.

01:45So we've just made a cream shade and there is a painting that is going on with it.

01:50So you could achieve anything you want, whatever color schemes, whatever shades, however you

01:55want to build your home can be done.

02:21So when you move out of the city into a remote rural area, there are some typical things

02:28that come with it and so I had a very steep learning curve, starting all the way from

02:33how to purchase land, which I've never done before and that to farmland, how to set up

02:38an NGO, for example, how to get the locals involved, how to form a bond with them.

02:50I knew I wanted to make this into a lifestyle, it wasn't just about proving a point, it was

03:06a decision that I had already taken.

03:08I was convinced that this is the way forward.

03:20The most important thing is how determined are you about what you are doing and how convinced

03:39are you yourself about what you are doing.