Bidya Banmali Pradhan

In 2015, this, you know, devastating earthquake happened in Nepal and Kathmandu Valley was most affected.

And all the bricklands, around 100, 102 bricklands were in Kathmandu Valley.

They were all destroyed.

So we started talking with the government and also with the bricklin entrepreneurs like we need to rebuild these bricklins in a very energy efficient and cleaner technologies.

And the government said either you have to take all these bricklins out of Kathmandu Valley or you need to build in a factory.

earthquake resistant design.

So we were having discussion and the timeline was not much because April, the earthquake happened and the brick season starts in November, December, the firing starts.

So we all came together and started working on the design.

And during that phase, we had a very

kind of, you know, meetings.

We didn't have just the engineers and architects to rebuild the cleans.

We had the bricklin entrepreneurs.

So with the practical knowledge and with the engineering design, we made a design book for natural draft, zigzag cleans, and a forced draft.

Forced draft is we have a fan to suck the air, to blow the air, and in natural draft, it's the natural wind that blows

uh you know and that would fire the coal and ignites the bricklings to bake this bricks no but as there were some brick entrepreneurs while designing this uh you know overall process so they had the full confidence that okay this brickland would work for us that's why this was so popular and the adoption was so fast

What the Bricklin owners said was, you know, they really benefited.

They were not worried about the pollution level because they are all business people.

So they were saying that the quality of bricks was really good.

Now they got more of the A-grade brick, around 90% and less breakage.

So they were really happy with the brick quality.