The idea
That was 2011. The question is still open, and Kaaya keeps exploring it through how the campus is built, how it works with the village, and how it welcomes visitors.
In Sanskrit, kaaya is the body. The name keeps the work tangible: building with mud, growing food, eating together. It is also why the café and stays are called Kaaya Offline. You have to come and feel it.
Kaaya began as a rural–urban connect. Supermarkets, online shopping and phones have pulled the city and the village apart. Kaaya tries to make the exchange between them flow both ways, so each gains from the other.
It is run as a social enterprise, held for now by K-Green Life Pvt Ltd until a better institutional form emerges.
No architects were hired. The walls are made of soil dug on site, by people from the village who know how to build with it. Mud breathes, keeping the rooms cool in summer and warm in winter. The huts follow the contours of the land, close enough to share, apart enough for quiet.
The newest building, the Annexe, joins traditional and modern methods, with local craftsmanship in its beams. Local soil, local skills and local knowledge kept the cost low.
The exchange between city and village should flow both ways.
A school camp pays local cooks and guides; a jar of pickle turns a farmer's surplus into income. Small exchanges like these keep some value close to home.
Start from what a place already has, not from what it lacks.
Expertise lives with the people who depend on it every day, like the dairy farmer who knows feed, costs and purity better than any textbook.
Students know the theory but have rarely handled living soil. Unstructured time, even boredom, has its place.
In Tilwari, wellbeing depends on neighbours, animals and the land. Sustainability is a way of life before it is a project.
In June 2013, the monsoon brought a calamity to the Kedar valley that took thousands of lives. It called for a humanitarian response unlike anything these mountains had seen.…
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By Zahara Czar, Intern at Kaaya Learning Center, May-June 2026 The village of Tilwari in Uttarakhand is witnessing a quiet rise in newly constructed mud houses. For generations,…
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The beginnings to embrace nature In the larger pursuit of “development and growth”, many of us lose our connection with nature, with ourselves, our families, our communities and…
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