Raising houses above rising flood waters

Martin Antony Kallupurakkal is, by his own admission, a very distressed man. A resident of Arupathinchira in Pulinkunnoo gram panchayat in the Kuttanad region of Kerala, his woes are closely associated with water which he sees no end of.

Martin owns the Kallupurakkal House, a 126-year-old structure in the traditional architecture. Its unique design and the landscape it is set in makes the house a popular setting for filmmakers. Two days of rain are enough for water to intrude his approximately 4000 sq. ft. house. There’s also a 2400 sq. ft. outhouse with a traditional in-house granary that he takes immense pride in.

For residents of Kuttanad, a 900 sq. km. delta region located 2.2 to 3 metres below sea level and spread across three districts — Alappuzha, Kottayam, and Pathanamthitta — waterlogging or even flooding during the monsoon is not new. However, things changed dramatically after the floods in 2018 and 2019 that took the lives of over 500 people and displaced over a million in the state.

According to a post-flood report submitted by the Kerala State Planning Board in 2019, more than 50,000 houses in Kuttanad region were completely or partly submerged due to heavy rainfall and the breaching of polder walls or bunds. Over 200,000 people were evacuated and housed in relief camps, and about 15,000 hectares of paddy crop were destroyed.

“Nobody, not even beggars, comes here these days for fear of drowning,” Martin says.

Displacement and migration

After the floods forced many in Kuttanad to take shelter in relief camps and faraway houses of relatives, some for over two months, panic set in among residents in anticipation of more such extreme events. “There’s no dignity to a life in relief camps,” says Minimol, the caretaker of Kallupurakkal House. Martin returned home after two months to find his pets and cattle dead in their kennels and sheds, and his house filled with slush. “Who wouldn’t feel disenchanted with life after witnessing such a tragedy?” he asks.

An increasing number of unmarried men in Kuttanad are feeling the impact of these changes. They have formed a support group of 40 men who meet frequently to discuss, among other things, loneliness. “We decided to support each other after two of our friends killed themselves due to alcoholism that was triggered by constant rejection from prospective brides. Kuttanad’s situation is affecting various aspects of our lives. We needed an avenue to speak up and share our sorrows,” says 38-year-old Charles Mathew.

A few metres from Martin’s house is fisherman Ramakrishna Pillai, whose single-bedroom house had knee-length water during the flood. “All our possessions got wet and dirty,” Pillai says.

Those who could afford to move to higher plains have done so since the floods. In the absence of official records, anecdotal evidence points to outmigration from Kuttanad as an ongoing trend: almost everyone in Kuttanad knows someone who has migrated. Special officer and director of the Kuttanad-based International Research and Training Centre for Below Sea Level Farming (IRTCBSF), K.G. Padmakumar, estimates migration at 17%. “There are abandoned villages across the region,” he says.

However, not many can afford to buy land or a house outside Kuttanad. “The land here fetched a price of Rs. 5-6 crores for a hectare at one time. It’s now available for as low as Rs. 50-60 lakhs in some places,” says resident Sreehari S., a chartered engineer. Padmakumar says there are places in Kuttanad where you could get an abandoned house for whatever you offer.

Some residents, like Martin, Minimol, and fisherman Pillai chose to stay back. “This is where I grew up. This is my land, the only place I know,” says Pillai as he rummages through the day’s catch, mostly fresh anchovies, to find a prawn to proudly display. “Kuttanad gives me everything but fresh drinking water, for free,” he says. Water pollution, high salinity, sewage, and other pollutants have diminished the potability of Kuttanad’s water.

Martin would’ve moved if not for his beloved baggage — the ancestral home — one of the few traditional architectures still standing in Pulinkunnoo village. He realises he is losing the house slowly to constant waterlogging from land settlement.

Martin has built a floor upstairs to move furniture and other valuable objects when water rises above a certain level. When we visited his house in the first week of June, after a few days of rain, water seepage from underground had inundated the front yard and breached the threshold of the house. Minimol had already mounted the furniture on layers of bricks and large concrete blocks in anticipation of more rains and more water in the house.  “When water rises, we have strange visitors,” Minimol laughs, sharing the story of a python entering the house on a flooded day.

Reclaimed land

Kuttanad boasts a unique geography, being one of the few regions globally where paddy is cultivated below sea level. This unique agricultural system, developed by farmers over 150 years, shares similarities with the Dutch polder system and has been recognised as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The origins of Kuttanad are debated. One explanation suggests it was initially a forested area that was burned to facilitate human settlements, giving it the name Chuttanad (Chutta-Nadu or Burnt Land), which later evolved into Kuttanad. Some argue that the black wooden logs, known as “Karinilam”, mined from paddy fields provide evidence of this theory.

Padmakumar offers another etymology, suggesting “Kuttanad” derives from “Kuthi-nadu,” meaning land that has been dug and reclaimed by humans.

Paddy cultivation in Kuttanad relies on a specific system of fresh and saline water flow. The paddy is cultivated in polders or tracts of lowland reclaimed from wetlands, locally known as padashekharam. Padmakumar says that historically, these polders with earthen bunds were made using carbonaceous silt from the Western Ghats during monsoons, rich in organic matter. “Indigenous people used this silt to construct earthen bunds called katta, creating polders of varying sizes from 50 ha to 1000 ha for community farming.”

A demand for more than one cultivation of paddy, which was the norm till then, brought structural changes. Stronger bunds made of stones and granites replaced the earthen ones. Additionally, water from the rivers that flew over polders to reach the Vembanad lake were made to pass through canals, notes Padmakumar.

Multiple such developmental initiatives changed the indigenous system of farming; water that Kuttanad received in abundance soon became a bane for the farmers.

Professor R. Ramakumar of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and a member of Kerala’s State Planning Board says that most of the developmental initiatives from the 1950s were largely roads, canals, a bund and a spillway to drain out the water and protect the fields from saltwater intrusion without upending lives or the polders. Some of these infrastructure projects remained incomplete due to various reasons, leading to repeated waterlogging and flooding, land settlement and subsidence, and multiple other related problems in Kuttanad.

“The solution is in finding ways to drain out water from the region effectively,” he says and suggests two ways to do it: One is to create space in Kuttanad itself for monsoon water to remain without flooding the fields or houses. This will ensure better floodwater management as prescribed by the state’s “Room for the River” project. Here, the problem is that only one crop of paddy cultivation can be undertaken. “The second solution is draining water by widening the canals and completing the existing projects like the AC canal. This solution, however, requires large-scale land acquisition, as things stand now,” Ramakumar explains.

House lifting catches on

Meanwhile, for Kuttanad’s people, a potential remedy to their fear of displacement came in the form of an architectural design solution: raising their houses above flood water levels. In most cases in Kuttanad, this involves raising the structures by three to six feet, according to Sreehari, who helped many fellow residents rebuild their houses and livelihoods as a flood volunteer.

Pillai benefited from the efforts of the Flood Volunteers Family, led by youth including Sreehari, and various other non-profits like the NSS of NA (Nair Service Society of North America) and World Vision. These groups gathered funds to build a 240 sq ft house for him, which stands on six concrete stilts, five feet above the ground. Similarly, Minimol and her husband demolished their modest home to build a new one, several feet above the ground.

Martin, on the other hand, has taken a more ambitious approach by using jacks to raise his house to a height he deemed safe—in this case, 16 feet above the ground, arguably the highest a house has been lifted in Kerala. “I have created a 4 ft water storage below the new structure,” he shares. Martin began with the outhouse because of the traditional architectural elements, including the in-house granary, that cannot be replicated.

This form of raising houses using hydraulic jacks, referred to as house lifting or house jacking, is a Western technology initially used to raise the height of wooden houses and translocate them if needed. In India, this technique was initiated and perfected on RCC (cement and concrete) structures in Haryana, particularly in the Yamunanagar district.

Rajesh Kumar Chauhan, a Yamunanagar resident, claims that his late father, Mamchand Chauhan, pioneered the lifting of RCC structures. Mongabay India was not able to verify the claim. Mamchand, a PWD contractor in the early 1990s, worked on the idea when faced with a bridge design issue that resulted in waterlogging in their locality. After successfully raising the bridge, he expanded to lifting roofs, buildings, houses, and apartments, eventually spreading the work to places like Gurgaon and New Delhi. Mamchand and his sons were recognised in the Limca Book of Records in 2005 for lifting roofs to increase building heights.

The technology involves raising the house’s basement using hydraulic jacks and sliding steel I-beams under the ground floor. Strong timber pieces are then cross-stacked beneath the raised floor with every lift, often in increments of six to 10 inches, until the desired height is reached. The jacks are then removed gradually, allowing the building to rest on the cross-stacked timbers.

Shyam Kumar Chauhan, director and owner of Haryana-based Aashirwad Houselifting, has lifted over 500 houses in the Kuttanad region. His family, too, got into the business in the 90s with roof lifting before they expanded to house lifting. The technology was initially popular in Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh before it spread to southern states, he says.

The technology has been operational in Kerala for the last 10-15 years. In 2007, Optume Builders in Kochi lifted a nine-storeyed Medical Trust Hospital in Kochi and 20,000 sq ft apartment with 15 houses which they claim to be the largest lifting projects in Kerala so far.

Initially, the demand was mostly for buildings affected by public infrastructural changes such as a new road being laid that necessitated moving houses around it. Later, with erratic rainfall and severe monsoon rains that states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala have been witnessing, waterlogging became a concern. Work is underway to lift the popular Mankombu Bhagavathy temple in Kuttanad dedicated to goddess Kali which was flooded in 2018.

Shyam Kumar points to greater demand for house lifting in states closer to oceans, such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, and Orissa. The demand in Tamil Nadu and Kerala has been so high since 2016 that he set up offices in Velachery, Chennai, and Kochi, Kerala.

Many residents in flood-prone areas like Kuttanad are opting for house lifting as it is cost-effective. Aashik Ibrahim of Optume Builders notes that lifting an existing house costs around Rs. 250 per sq ft to increase the height by three feet, whereas building a new one would be at least eight times more expensive.

The labour is mostly from northern states such as Haryana and Uttar Pradesh though local labour, too is involved. “Labour charges are the same for local and migrant hands; it is easier to work with migrant labour as they are more efficient and take fewer breaks,” points out Ibrahim.

Homeopath Dr. Dinesh N. Nair lifted his 3000 sq ft house in Thiruvalla in 2022 by about 4.5 feet after flooding in 2018 and repeated waterlogging for a few years after that. The house lifting cost him around Rs 25 lakh, compared to over Rs 1 crore for building a new house of the same size.

Ibrahim highlights that climate change has indirectly caused an increase in house lifting projects. Changes in public infrastructure, such as road widening or height additions, often lead to flooding during heavy rains, forcing residents to modify their houses and buildings. His company is now exploring design solutions for intense summer heat in the state, acknowledging that as climate change continues, so will innovations like house lifting.

Banner image: Kuttanad during flooding. Located below sea level, the region faces repeated waterlogging and flooding. Many residents are finding a solution in raising their houses above flood water levels using house lifting technology. Image by Sreehari.