Floating House Project: How this engineer’s creation can combat floods in Bihar

Prashant Kumar, a mechanical engineer and an artist, is a man with solutions—no matter the problem's complexity. He has an acumen for low-tech solutions, especially using waste, and transforming them into livelihood opportunities for marginalised populations. 

In September 2023, the Bihar native constructed a carbon-neutral house on the banks of the Ganges in the Bhojpur district, which floats on water during the monsoons and stands firm on land in the autumn, winter, and summer months.

The Floating House Project is Kumar’s solution to flooding during the monsoons that cause heavy damage to lives, livestock, and assets every year in Bihar. 

How it all began

In 2015, Kumar met Canadian educator Ben Reid-Howells at a cycling event in Pune, and two years later, the duo embarked on a 36-month journey from India to Scotland, traversing 60,000 kms and 22 countries. 

When they stopped, they taught local communities resourceful methods to harness waste. Kumar says his objectives for social change are based on the principles of sustainability and a bottom-up approach. 

After he returned from his expedition four years later, Kumar had to stay put in Pune as Bihar was ravaged by floods, leaving close to 1,270 villages inundated and 130 people dead. 

“I was sitting in Pune, listening to ground stories from my friends who were involved in relief operations back home, and I thought, while people came together to help each other after the damage was done, none of us knew how to mitigate it,” he tells SocialStory. 

In 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Kumar returned home and started working with nine people—migrant workers who had come to Arrah for work, and locals.

“Flooding wasn’t an isolated problem; it was part of a larger cycle of food insecurity, poverty, poor farming practices, and ecological degradation that had to be addressed comprehensively,” he says.

Kumar adds his first idea was firmly rooted in prevention—creating an entire infrastructure and way of life that could prevent flooding and was completely climate resilient, or even regenerative.

An upcycling artist for 14 years, Kumar moved to a remote village near the Ganges in Arrah, Bhojpur, and sold his artwork to fund his project and train his team in climate-resilient architecture. 

Kumar says, “We trained the workers to become welders, machine experts, and be part of some very outlandish experiments that we would either succeed or fail in, but figured out together.”

He paid each worker between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 depending on their skills and the nature of work.

The team, too, started envisioning how this model could help vulnerable populations in Nepal and Bangladesh, from where most of the workers had come. “This cemented the foundation of our vision,” he adds.

Eventually, the project received funding and expertise from The Netherlands-based Waterstudio, an architectural firm that makes sustainable, flexible floating projects, and The Meaalofa Foundation, a Germany-based collective that offers support in migration, social well-being, and environment.

How the house floats

Kumar and Reid-Howells, during their motorcycle journey, employed local indigenous processes, upcycling techniques, and artistic vision to transform post-construction cement debris into intricate mosaics and created technology that would warm the interiors of refugee camps during winters.

Drawing from that experience, Kumar sourced every material to build the first prototype of the Floating House Project within a 10 km radius. The house’s structure is fashioned out of large drums, has a skeleton of metal pipes, and the bricks used are made of cow dung, lime, jaggery, and rice. 

These bricks, Kumar says, come in two variations—a lightweight one that floats on water and a denser one that keeps the interiors warm during winters and cool during summers.

Not just that. Kumar consulted the local community elders, many of them in their 90s, for his project, who passed on the traditional practices they had been using since their youth. 

“Every technique we have used is native to Bihar. The elders were a source of knowledge and inspiration for us, and we soaked in much of the traditional building knowledge from them,” he adds. 

The team finished the prototype during last year's monsoon. The floating house has three rooms—each roughly 10x12 ft—with a total floating platform of 30x30 ft. It has one kitchen and a dry toilet, where the solid waste is collected in a container filled with rice husk and sawdust, and composted.

The house can accommodate six to eight people, which, Kumar says, is the average strength of a rural family in Bihar and their livestock. It gets its electricity from four solar panels on its rooftop, which can generate up to 720 watts.

Kumar and his team built the prototype house on a budget of Rs 6 lakh. However, the engineer wants to further reduce its cost to Rs 2 lakh to make it easily replicable.

Supported by the district collector of Bhojpur, he is now waiting to clear a few environmental tests to implement the project in other places in India. 

Today, Kumar has expanded his training for migrant and local workers on building climate-resilient houses into a Centre of Resilience. The engineer hires and trains low-income workers to earn a living in a way that regenerates the land, challenges social barriers, and demonstrates the power of sustainable, accessible solutions. 

“My long-term plan is to train people to use solar and wind energy and grow seasonal food in smaller areas using aquaponics, hydroponics, and permaculture in a way they become completely self-sustainable. The Floating House Project is just the first step to this macro vision,” he says.