Author: K.P. Narayana Kumar
Publication: The Week
Date: March 7, 2004
URL: http://www.the-week.com/24mar07/currentevents_article10.htm#1
Ulrich Wallner has a solution for
the homeless. The mechanical engineer from Nurenberg in Germany has devised
a 'joiner' to interlock bamboo shoots to make the frame for a low-cost
house.
It works like a mortise (a cavity
in a piece of wood) prepared to receive a tenon-a projection at the end
of a piece of bamboo shaped for insertion into the wood-to make a joint.
Each joiner holds four bamboo shoots, two vertical and two horizontal,
whose free ends are then inserted into the cavities in other joiners. Many
bamboo shoots are thus held together to form a frame.
Wallner's love affair with India
started when he first came to Delhi in 1994 to install machinery at a gutkha
manufacturing company. His interest in India grew and during one of his
many business visits to Delhi, he fell in love with Phool of Arunachal
Pradesh, and married her. "India has got a spirit which makes me keep coming
here," says Wallner, who discovered bamboo in the tribal villages of the
northeast. "The tribals use bamboo for everything from housing to medicine.
I thought of how we could expand its scope to urban conditions." He went
back to Germany with his pregnant wife, and returned with tools to work
on bamboo, and a son, Kai Leon.
Says Wallner, who has been travelling
across India, furthering his bamboo project and taking it up at the government
level, "India is a land of opportunity, it's a great place for creative
minds."
