Country and hazard overview
The Indian subcontinent presses into the Eurasian tectonic
plate in the north, causing India – along with other nations
in the region – to have experienced many small and a few
devastating earthquakes during the last century. After
witnessing the pattern of earthquakes and other natural
hazards that resulted in a series of abrupt but predictable
disasters, SEEDS began working with communities,
technical universities and government authorities in 1994.
They helped communities retrofit unsafe schools and
adopted strategies for reducing losses from future crises,
using schools as a catalyst for community-wide change.
CASE STUDY
Training masons to build
seismic-resistant schools
Country: India
Organisation: India’s national and state
governments, UNDP, World Bank
State-wide school
construction program
Hazards: Earthquakes
Keywords: cascading training, rural and remote
oversight, community oversight, large-scale
In 2004, the Uttar Pradesh State Government was planning
a massive school construction project in response to the
widening education gap. At this time, the UNDP Disaster
Risk Management Program (DRMP) as well as the Education
for All (EFA) initiative were both underway at a national level.
Some UNDP and MoE officials saw the school construction
project as a chance for disaster risk reduction and decided
to teach the MoE and state government about safer schools.
Summary: In 2006, the Uttar Pradesh State
Government in India sanctioned a hazard-resistant
design for a massive school construction project
that aimed to build thousands of schools at the
same time. At the time, there was government
capacity but local capacity was low, creating a
good opportunity to institutionalise a communitybased approach. There were too few engineers
to be present across thousands of construction
sites and many of the schools were remote. This
emphasised the need for community involvement.
Influenced in part by devastation in the 2001 Gujarat
earthquake – in which 15,000 schools collapsed – and two
historic earthquakes in Uttar Pradesh, the state government
decided to change their existing school design, which
lacked earthquake safety measures. Under the DRMP the
Indian Government created the position of National Seismic
Adviser who was responsible for updating the existing
design. Uttar Pradesh contained multiple levels of seismicity,
but given the large scale of the project, the government
decided to create a design suitable for the highest
earthquake probability in the state.
Because thousands of schools were being built
simultaneously, construction oversight was
challenging. But the state government saw it as an
opportunity to raise the capacity of thousands of
communities through cascading training. By 2007,
the state government, in partnership with UNDP
and with a loan from the World Bank, constructed
almost 7,000 seismically safe schools and 82,000
additional classrooms in Uttar Pradesh.
The National Seismic Adviser changed simple features in
the school design to increase its seismic resistance. These
included:
• Moving doors 60cms from vertical joints.
IRAN
• Adding rebar to tie foundations and slabs together.
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SECTION III: CONSTRUCTION
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• Placing three horizontal ‘earthquake’ ring beams that
circumscribe the walls (at the foundation, below the
window, and above the window).
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Calcutta !
Imphal
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• Increasing the proportion of cement to sand and stone
blast in the foundation.
Mumbai
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Bangalore
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After determining the changes would add an additional 8
percent to construction costs, the MoE entered a year of
negotiations with the World Bank to increase their longstanding loan that had supplemented national and state
funding for EFA. With funds in hand, the easy part was over.
Now the state needed to train masons to build safer schools.
Chennai
Trivandrum !
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