ARCHITECTURE OF. RURAL HOUSING 59 the entire cultural traditions of the vernacular architecture of the region are swept away. If we look at the vernacular rural mud architecture of India, it presents an incredibly rich tradition of a craft full of cultural signs, symbols and functional details. The catalogue houses are mere boxes that are supposed to be created by the millions up and down the country. Thus none of the agencies who have developed their catalogue prototypes inside urban offices, have been able to establish any sort of link with the rural heritage of the country. It is this second consequence which has more serious long-term implications because it is validating an approach based on urban thinking which ignores the problems of the field. As long as the technicians are trapped within the city they cannot possibly produce solutions for the multifarious rural situations that exist in India. It is clear that the only valid approach will be one which plants the technician in the heart of the rural areas as part of a mass movement for rural housing. Apart from a very few exceptions in Uttar Pradesh the integrated approach to rural uplift remains but an idea. Although everybody in this field is aware that the management and planning of a good environment requires an inter-disciplinary approach towards the settlement as a whole, housing still tends to be an isolated input. Thus even the provision of house sites for the landless and a provision for them of a government-subsidised house ignores drinking water requirements, employment opportunities, medical, health and other important programmes. In many cases these houses have therefore been abandoned because it is not viable for a community to live in houses that are located on isolated patches of land and are not part of the community life.9 However, without falling into the danger of talking only in terms of nebulous impossible solutions, we can simply state that the dimensions are vast and no simplistic approach is going to help. Let us then finally confine ourselves to architectural issues of a narrower kind. These are questions which relate to the kind of architecture that is really desirable for rural areas. We have already seen the official box solutions and it is easy to reject them. Where then are we to look? Perhaps the greatest energy has been put into this problem by Laurie Baker who stands as a giant in this field. Baker (62), a qualified architect, first worked in China before 1949 when he moved to India to work with a leper mission. He then moved on to Literacy House in Lucknow, and then to an obscure mountain village in Uttar Pradesh. He worked there in the villages for 18 years before moving to the extreme southern tip of India in Kerala. With this background, thoroughly steeped in rural India, Baker is able to innovate at both technical and aesthetic levels and also focus his attention on the minutest detail. At a technical level. Baker showed how economy can be introduced into rural architecture without confining the inhabitant