Amaravati. Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu laid the foundation stone on Sunday, October 4, for a 3D concrete printing housing pilot under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin. At Burripalem ST Colony in Guntur district, they also began construction of a printed house together with a beneficiary family.
The pilot has 100 houses at Burripalem and 77 at Obulanayudupalem. The total outlay is ₹13.93 crore. The Ministry of Rural Development is putting in ₹9.44 crore, and the Andhra Pradesh government ₹4.40 crore.
3 lakh houses instead of 76,000
Addressing thousands of people at the event, Chouhan said the Centre and the state are working together to make Andhra Pradesh the number one state in the country. He said ministry officials had told him the state was eligible for only 76,000 houses. After Naidu asked that every poor family get a permanent home, "we have sanctioned 3 lakh houses instead of 76,000," Chouhan said.
Naidu thanked him and said the state needs 9 lakh houses in total. He said the remaining 6 lakh would be sanctioned by the Centre once the first phase is completed. It has not been announced how many of the 3 lakh houses will use 3D printing.
The event was attended by Union Minister of State Dr. Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani, state ministers Nadendla Manohar, Kolusu Parthasarathy and Kandula Durgesh, BJP state president P.V.N. Madhav and senior officials, along with farmers, rural residents and women.
How the method works
In this method, wall sections are printed layer by layer from a digital design and then fitted on a prepared foundation. Officials had earlier said they expect a house to be ready in under two months, with fewer delays from labour shortages and cooler interiors.
The printer makes the walls. In a Kerala project built by Chennai startup Tvasta at Nirmithi Kendra in Thiruvananthapuram, the machine laid the concrete, while the door, window and roof were built the conventional way. That split matters for cost, because the savings apply to the part that is printed.
What earlier projects have found
India has tried this before on a smaller scale.
L&T's 3D-printed post office at Cambridge Layout, Bengaluru took 43 days to build and cost an estimated ₹26 lakh for 1,021 sq ft. The company put that about 40% below conventional construction. L&T's head of operations, George Abraham, said the job would have taken about eight months by the conventional method.
Tvasta's CEO, Adithya VS, estimated 20-30% savings over conventional construction on its projects. The startup's first 3D-printed house, at IIT Madras, was completed in 21 days, with modules printed at its Chennai facility and assembled on site.
In Telangana, builders Apsuja Infratech and Simpliforge Creations printed a temple at Siddipet, with the aim of halving the usual construction time to two to three months.
Habitat for Humanity in Virginia printed a 1,300 sq ft house in about 40 hours. It cost around $215,000, which was $25,000 less than the first one. The walls took two weeks, while traditional finishing took about six months. So printing speeds up the shell, but the finishing work still takes time.
In Mexico, ICON and New Story printed 650 sq ft homes for about $10,000 each and hope to bring that closer to $4,000. Dubai has set a target for 25% of its buildings to be 3D printed by 2030.
What to watch
Most savings figures so far come from the companies that built these projects, not from independent audits. Burripalem will test the method on a larger batch of homes under PMAY-G cost limits. The numbers to watch are days per house, final cost per house and how fast the roof and finishing keep up.
