Nepalis race to rebuild half a million homes before the monsoon hits

The earthquake that hit Nepal on 25 April destroyed Anantaling, a small, ancient hill settlement 15 miles southeast of the capital, Kathmandu, where an estimated 120,000 people have been displaced. Every one of the 60-odd houses in Anantaling collapsed into rubble. "Our houses were old, construction was of poor quality, and even the stone used for construction was soft," says Kamal Nyaupane, as he shows me the remains of his wrecked home. "Not a single house survived." After the disaster struck, the rich migrated out of the village to the lower lands where there are roads, electricity and a market, leaving only the poor up in the hills – with no relief and no place to live.

One NGO, Manabiya Aastha Nepal, constructed temporary shelters for the villagers using bent corrugated tin sheets in tunnel-like structures in place of the ruined buildings. "People were too traumatised," says Nyaupane. "They were not in position to help each other as they do in other normal times." Shree Kumar Ranjit, chairman of the NGO, raised funds to extend the project to other villages in the area. Ranjit says they have now built almost 200 houses.

The tunnel design has been used before: in 2005, a German technician living in Kashmir named Titus Gall developed it to create shelter for victims of the catastrophic 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and India, that killed 75,000 people and left up to 3.5 million homeless. In 2010, a tour-company-owner and operator named Eli Kretzmann used it to house some of the eight million people displaced by a huge summer flood in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Nepalese versions of the dome houses are made by metal pipes bent into arches, their ends driven into the ground, and nine corrugated tin sheets bent over them, creating an 11-by-12-foot dome, tied up with galvanised wires. The open sides can be closed with tarpaulin, brick or stone. Villagers have used mulch or thatch to top the corrugated roofs and protect from heat and cold. The shelters cost about $100, and take two or three hours for two people to build.

The design spread quickly: about 500 dome-houses went up. "The transitional shelters have gone viral, which is what we wanted to do from the beginning," says Soham Dhakal, a member of Project EK, an informal citizen action group. "It is the only way to meet the needs of the masses before the monsoon arrives." IMPACT Nepal, an NGO, is helping to build transitional metal shelters for 700 households in the Kalika village, about 50 miles east of Kathmandu. But cost is a problem – $100 is a lot in a country where the annual per capita gross national income is $730. With the exception of a few thousand households that have received assistance, most residents of rural Nepal who lost their homes in the quake have been left to construct their shelters for the monsoon season themselves.

In the village of Dadhikot, some 15 miles southeast of Kathmandu, Shobha Nyaupane is busy retrieving useful materials from her damaged house. Men are clearing rubble from the upper stories. Nyaupane wants to salvage the ground floor. "It's not safe to live in this house," she says, "but we can use it as a grain store and to keep cattle." In the open field outside, her husband is hammering wooden beams to bamboo poles to make a temporary shelter.

"We have been living in that tent so far, but we can't continue for long," says Nyaupane, pointing to a tarpaulin. At first, the community waited for the government to come up with schemes and resources to rebuild their houses. But time is running out. "We are doing it on our own. We will try to do it by ourselves," she says. "We can't wait because monsoon is approaching fast."

Nyaupane's concerns are echoed across the country; more than half a million households still do not have a reliable roof over their heads, and the rainy season is less than a month away.

The state government has allotted $40m to be distributed as cash subsidies of $150 to each homeless family, meant to be spent on construction materials. The government was to provide two bundles of corrugated sheets and three kilograms of iron nails for each family, but it switched to cash subsidy, realising it could not secure a supply chain for the tin sheets.

Corrugated tin is in short supply in Nepal. The country's four major corrugated sheets manufacturing companies produce enough to roof about 6,000 houses of average size, according to Hitesh Golchha, executive director of Hulas Steel. With almost half a million houses demolished, tens of thousands must be built each day. As a result, Nepal needs other options that are affordable, earthquake-safe and sustainable.

The Himalayan Climate Initiative has come up with what it calls "resilient home designs". The two-room, 18-by-9-foot designs are customisable and modular: steel frames that can be dismantled and reassembled in a few hours. "We will give the structure and the roof to the villagers, and they can customise the walls and flooring depending on their interest, affordability and the local materials available," says Dawa Steven Sherpa from HCI. The basic structure is estimated to cost about $850 – for a long-term solution it is therefore relatively affordable.

One of the chief concerns is whether the new construction will be sustainable. Experts look to Haiti for what not to do: they say one of the primary reasons for the failure of housing projects begun after the 2010 earthquake was the ignorance of local materials and technology and the fact that they did not cater to the needs of the people.

"While designing new housing structures we should consider the topography, weather, and also custom and culture of the country," says Jiba Lal Shrestha, vice-chancellor of Nepal's National Academy of Science and Technology. "We have seen that the designs that use local materials and technology have become most successful."

Bamboo, for example, is cheap and readily available. The non-profit Abari Bamboo and Earth Initiative designs and builds eco-friendly structures. "We have designed transit homes costing about $400 to $500 that last two to three years," says Nripal Adhikary of Abari. "We are building 1,600 such houses ... with financial support from ActionAid," an international NGO.

Nepal's National Planning Commission has called for an exhibition and exchange of ideas next week to come up with an action-plan for reconstruction that, they hope, will make up for some of the regulatory and building mistakes of the past. "The scale of damage has proven that our existing structures in rural areas were not safe," says Bhai Kaji Tiwari, a senior urban planner at the Ministry of Urban Development. "Earthquake-safety could be improved with only a slight modification in our existing housing designs."