In the flood-prone villages of Assam, India, centuries-old traditional stilt houses are receiving modern makeovers to better withstand increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. The upgraded structures, known locally as chang ghars, combine ancient architectural wisdom with contemporary engineering solutions to protect communities living along the Brahmaputra River and its tributaries.
Umananda Pathuri, a 42-year-old mason from Nikori village, keeps watch over his eight-year-old daughter while his wife rests with their toddler. Outside their elevated home, floodwaters continue to rise as relentless rains pound the region. "We're the Mising, Assam's river people, so of course the child can swim," Pathuri explains. "We're used to floods, but they now seem unpredictable, more treacherous somehow."
Pathuri belongs to one of the few remaining groups of skilled craftsmen who build these traditional raised bamboo houses in areas near the Dhansiri River, a tributary of the mighty Brahmaputra. These lightweight structures feature walls made of porous grass mats and bamboo stilts designed to protect homes when rivers overflow their banks. The effectiveness of this ancient design became dramatically clear in 2017 when massive floods destroyed over 4,000 houses and damaged more than 100,000 others across the region. Remarkably, the few homes that survived relatively unscathed were traditional chang ghars.
For centuries, these elevated homes have provided a low-tech, cost-effective solution for flood-resistant housing throughout the region. Similar architectural approaches exist worldwide in flood-prone areas. Communities in Brazil's Amazon basin construct floating houses or stilt homes to stay dry during annual floods, while in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, traditional bamboo and wood houses called nhà sàn feature stilts whose height is determined by historical flood peaks.
However, the familiar flooding patterns that Pathuri's Mising tribe had adapted to over generations have changed dramatically in recent years. Floods now occur more frequently, last longer, and behave more erratically than before, creating urgent pressure for chang ghars to evolve to meet contemporary challenges threatening Mising lives and livelihoods. "Every year, different areas get flooded and the river does not recede as easily as it used to," Pathuri observes. He notes that Nikori and neighboring villages now often remain waterlogged from late June sometimes all the way through October. "The bamboo stilts and mud foundations of our traditional chang ghars were designed to cope with floods that lasted a short time, not this kind of prolonged water-logging."
Recognizing this growing crisis, architects Anshu Sharma and Manu Gupta, co-founders of the Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS), stepped in to help. SEEDS is an Indian non-governmental organization that has focused on disaster management and mitigation across the Indian subcontinent since 1994. According to Gupta, changing weather patterns combined with increased construction on floodplains and extensive riverbank embankments—which prevent floodwater from returning to rivers—are making people more vulnerable to floods rather than more resilient. The growing trend of locals choosing concrete homes instead of traditional stilted structures creates what Gupta calls "the perfect recipe for disaster in Assam."
In response to these challenges, SEEDS began collaborating with local masons in 2018 to develop an improved chang ghar design that required less maintenance and lasted longer than traditional versions while preserving the same appearance, ventilation, and height well-suited to local geography. The organization trained approximately 20 bamboo masons to implement this new design on 80 model houses through a project funded by the Godrej Group, an Indian conglomerate. Amrit Morang and Pathuri, both Nikori village residents, were among the trainees.
"The first innovation we learned was to set the stilts in a concrete base rather than directly in the mud," Morang recalls. "The SEEDS trainers also taught us to treat the bamboo stilts with chemicals to make them last longer. This ensured that the house could survive more waterlogging than the traditional version." This chang ghar 2.0 design also incorporates a flexible joinery system allowing homeowners to raise floors even higher if necessary, plus cross-bracing bamboo supports to help structures withstand movements caused by floods and earthquakes—particularly important since the region sits in a high seismic activity zone.
Additional improvements included using locally available cane to tie bamboo components, which proved both cheaper and stronger than traditional methods. "Also, traditionally, we always peeled the outer layer of bamboo before using it for construction," Pathuri explains. "SEEDS told us this was unnecessarily time-consuming and made the bamboo prone to termite attacks." The enhanced design costs about $800 to build—roughly 20 percent more than traditional chang ghars—but the mainframe takes only a week to construct and requires significantly lower annual repair costs.
"While our traditional Mising stilt huts needed repairs every year, the SEEDS design has lasted about eight years, needing only minor maintenance," Pathuri reports. He used the new design to build his own house in 2018 after his previous stilted home was destroyed in the 2017 floods. Given the annual repairs his old home required, he was ready for change.
Despite the clear advantages, some residents of Nikori and other flood-prone Assam areas initially hesitated to adopt the new design. The government classified these homes as "kutcha" or temporary structures because they used bamboo, thatch, grass, and reeds—materials considered to have shorter lifespans. Kutcha houses carry lower social status compared to modern concrete homes and cannot easily serve as collateral for bank loans, creating additional barriers to adoption.
Undeterred by these challenges, SEEDS developed yet another upgraded design in 2021. Working with donor partner PricewaterhouseCoopers India, SEEDS architects created a chang ghar version designed to last longer and accommodate a wider variety of raw materials including grass, reeds, wood, and other easily sourced materials that could potentially be replicated in other flood-prone regions worldwide. This larger structure was specifically designed to serve as a flood relief shelter in Nikori, with both Pathuri and Morang joining the mason team that constructed it.
"We used the same bamboo superstructure design as before, but replaced bamboo stilts with reinforced concrete columns to give the building greater stability and load-bearing strength," Morang explains. The shelter can house up to 10 flood-affected families simultaneously and has regularly served as a community activity space since its completion in 2021. Thanks to its enhanced durability and flood resilience, people across Assam are now replicating this latest design.
Pathuri reports steady demand for the new model, with similar houses being constructed wherever Mising populations live, primarily along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. "In Kaziranga National Park, which is over 20 miles from here, large hotels have been built using this design," he notes. He estimates receiving more than 60 commissions for this newest chang ghar variant, while Morang has replicated the design in over 60 dwellings plus several schools.
The increased adoption of concrete-stilted chang ghars has been partially driven by expanded funding under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, a government program providing 1.3 lakh Indian rupees (approximately $1,500) to low-income rural families for house construction. SEEDS has also implemented this design in Odisha, an eastern Indian state over 1,000 miles away that faces similar flood and typhoon risks. However, the design hasn't spread organically there as it has in Assam, likely because stilt construction isn't a traditional practice in that region, according to SEEDS chief of programs Yezdani Rahman.
In Assam, where these humble fishermen's huts on stilts have become emblematic of the lush landscape, they're accomplishing far more than simply keeping Morang, Pathuri, and other Mising people dry during flood seasons. They demonstrate how vernacular architecture principles can help Indian towns and villages adapt effectively to climate change challenges. A July 2025 World Bank report indicates that building flood-resilient infrastructure in India could prevent $5 billion in flood-related losses by 2030 and $30 billion by 2070.
Morang, who built his own home using the new SEEDS specifications, expresses satisfaction with the results. "My house has weathered long seasons of flooding, and its concrete foundation and stilts are still going strong," he says. "Now, whenever anyone asks me to build a traditional chang ghar, I add these improvements to create a structure that will truly serve as a refuge during times of flood and rain."
