This article has been published in partnership with Kalaari Capital.

Five weeks after the Chennai floods, most of the volunteers had gone home.

In the first few days, help had seemed to come from everywhere. People arrived with food, water and relief material. Among them was Shreeram Ravichandran, then a second-year civil engineering student at IIT Madras with Engineers Without Borders.

As the weeks passed, he began noticing something the first rush of relief could not solve.

In settlements between Chennai’s OMR and ECR, homes made of thatch had been washed away. Families had lost belongings and the spaces they had lived in, sometimes within hours.

“Within just moments, you lose your complete home and all your belongings. Everything is gone,” he recalls.

The floods had affected Shreeram too, but differently. His neighbourhood faced power cuts and interruptions in food supply. The building he lived in remained standing.

“For these people, they just didn’t know what they were going to do the next week or the next day, where they would stay,” he says. “It had just become empty land.”

Long after the water receded, that difference stayed with him. Relief could arrive within days. A permanent house could take years. What was a family supposed to do in between?

The years between a tent and a home

Back at IIT Madras, Shreeram and his fellow students began trying to understand that gap.

They looked at what had happened after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and found that permanent rehabilitation could stretch across several years. Families might receive tents or tarpaulins immediately, while permanent housing came much later.

“We understood that the transition period is not a month. It is a few years,” says Shreeram. “You give out tarpaulin shelters or tents for the first 30 days, but there is a gap from 30 days to five years, 10 years.”

That gap became their problem statement.

Could they build something sturdier than a tent, quick to transport and easy to open at the site?

At this point, there was no startup.

There was Shreeram and his childhood friend P Gobinath, or Gobi. They had known each other since Class 9, prepared for IIT together and gone on to study civil engineering at IIT Madras.

Inside Gobi’s hostel room, they pushed aside the furniture and started experimenting........

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