Bhubaneswar, July 5: The building materials and technology promotion council would set up demonstration houses in the city to popularise the green and emerging building technologies.

The state government will provide one acre at Chandrashekharpur for the project where the council, which is under the Union ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation, would build 40 houses in the first phase.

Housing director A.K. Mishra has written to the director of estate to alienate one acre of government land at Chandrashekharpur.

Along with setting up the houses solely for demonstration purposes, the council will also provide training to the local construction workforce and organise capacity-building programmes for them at its own cost.

"As the state government has agreed to join in the Centre's endeavour to adopt such construction technology in order to provide house to all, it would provide land for setting up the demonstration houses. Accordingly, we have identified a patch of land and written to the director of estate to alienate it," said Mishra.

Sources said that under the demonstration housing project, the council would build 40 houses in a cluster, either in single storey or two-storey (G+1) to four-storey (G+3), according to local requirement.

Each unit will have a minimum carpet area of 25sqm and built up area of 32sqm with at least two habitable rooms, kitchen, bathroom, toilet and balcony or verandah.

It will also develop on-site infrastructure such as internal roads, pathways, boundary wall, underground tank and electrification. Houses will be designed keeping in view the disaster resistance features.

Such projects have been promoting proven and emerging building material and technologies through identification, evaluation, standardisation, certification, capacity-building, training and field-level application.

Recently, the council had built a number of such demonstration houses in various parts of the country. This has helped in building confidence and acceptability of such technologies among public and private construction agencies and professionals.

On completion of the project, the demonstration houses would be handed over to the state government for allotment and upkeep. Besides, the state government would replicate the technologies in their future projects and would showcase the project to their professionals or general public for confidence building.

An official in the urban and housing department said the council would set up two demonstration housing projects in the state every year.