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.
Modulus later developed modular buildings for places where conventional construction is difficult.
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.
A prefabricated Modulus unit is transported by truck before final installation at the site.
“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.
Shreeram Ravichandran and P Gobinath, childhood friends and co-founders of Modulus Housing.
Inside Gobi’s hostel room, they pushed aside the furniture and started experimenting with cardboard and thread. Their interest in buildings had long preceded the floods. Now, they had a real problem to apply it to.
IIT Madras helped them move from idea to prototype. The Centre for Innovation provided Rs 50,000, while Nirmaan, the institute’s pre-incubator, later gave them Rs 2 lakh.
“What we lacked was experience and capital,” says Shreeram. “These institutions did a wonderful job of providing both.”
When a college project had to face the real world
The harder question came in 2018, when both friends graduated.
Gobi had interned with Shapoorji Pallonji and received a pre-placement offer. Shreeram had conventional career options too. Their shelter, meanwhile, was still closer to an engineering project than a company.
Modulus Housing showcases its flatpack and foldable building systems at an industry event.
“There was no business in hand,” Shreeram says. “You have to go full-time at it, build it and deliver it.”
Their families backed the decision. Around Rs 20 lakh went into getting Modulus Housing started, and for roughly the first year and a half, there was no revenue. Grants, competitions and prize money kept the work moving.
Then the founders ran into a problem built into the idea that had inspired them: disasters are unpredictable.
“You simply cannot plan for disasters,” says Shreeram. “Being prepared for disaster is itself a luxury. We have problems to fight on an everyday basis.”
A foldable milk cabin built by Modulus for dairy services
So they began looking for problems that existed every day.
Modulus started making portable cabins for construction sites and migrant workers. The work brought in revenue and widened their understanding of where the technology could fit.
“In rural and remote places, construction is hard. You don’t get good materials, you don’t get good labour,” says Shreeram. “That is when our vision graduated into: why restrict ourselves to post-disaster buildings?”
That question would soon take on new urgency.
When their building met a disaster
Before COVID-19, Modulus had already begun exploring portable healthcare infrastructure.
SELCO Foundation approached the team about developing healthcare spaces for mobile communities, where permanent facilities were difficult to plan. Through that work, the team learnt what a portable healthcare space needed.
A staff member outside a modular medical centre and ICU installed by Modulus Housing.
Then COVID-19 reached India.
Hospitals needed beds and isolation spaces quickly. Years spent working on movable buildings suddenly had a clear application.
With clinical inputs from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Modulus developed MediCAB, a portable healthcare unit that could be configured for screening, isolation and intensive care.
In 2020, a MediCAB unit was deployed in Wayanad, Kerala, with support from Habitat for Humanity. It could be transported in folded form and assembled at the destination by a small team within hours.
A Modulus healthcare facility built from modular units, designed for rapid on-site assembly.
“The whole reason for us starting up was a disaster,” says Shreeram. “To get inspiration from one disaster, and before the next one struck have a live product that could serve people, was a very good feeling.”
There was fear too. While much of the country was being told to limit exposure, Modulus teams had to travel to hospitals and COVID treatment sites to install buildings.
“I was super worried,” Shreeram says. “I had to ask my team to go exactly to those hotspots where patients were concentrated.”
Healthcare staff at a MediCAB facility, one of Modulus Housing’s portable medical deployments.
As deployments grew, district collectors, health secretaries and other officials began asking whether the same model could help build anganwadis, schools, agricultural shelters and small healthcare facilities. For Shreeram, those conversations confirmed that the technology could go beyond emergencies.
What if a building behaved more like a product?
The idea was tested most sharply in the Northeast.
After the pandemic, Modulus began working extensively in Meghalaya and Nagaland, where hilly terrain, heavy rain and difficult access make construction harder. Over roughly 12 to 14 months, Shreeram says the company delivered about 450 to 470 buildings across separate locations.
That experience reinforced an observation he had been carrying.
“A smartphone can reach rural India. A tractor can reach. Consumer electronics can reach,” he says. “It is because they are productised and done on an assembly line. But good quality services don’t reach the same way.”
Buildings, he realised, could be approached similarly.
A Modulus building used for Mission Lakadong in Meghalaya, where the company expanded after COVID.
“Make buildings like products,” he says. “Make assembly lines so that they can be delivered at the remotest and rural places.”
At Modulus, that means moving as much work as possible away from the final site.
“Everybody talks about the two hours on site,” says Febin, a senior project manager who has worked on Modulus deployments. “Those two hours are the easy part. The real work is in the factory.”
Wiring, plumbing points and finishes are prepared and checked before dispatch. In a remote hill district, one missing component can stop an installation.
Much of the fabrication is completed in the factory before modular units are sent to site.
“One missing part is not a small defect. It is a full stop,” Febin says. “There is no hardware shop to run to. So we moved every possible failure point upstream, to where we can control it.”
The structure folds for transport and opens at site, almost like a telescope, using a small crew, basic tools and minimal heavy equipment.
For Shreeram, Mon in Nagaland shows why that matters. According to Modulus, the community health centre there had 12 beds serving around 50,000 people. The company later installed a 30-bed facility that is being used as a general ward and ICU.
A consultation underway inside a modular healthcare unit built for use in community settings.
“If your building needs a crane, or a big skilled crew, or a second truck, it is simply not going to reach the people who need it most,” he says. “So every design decision, we test it against this: one truck, no crane, crew of four.”
From cardboard & thread to 1500+ buildings
Nearly a decade has passed since Shreeram and Gobi experimented with cardboard and thread in a hostel room.
Modulus says it has since delivered more than 1,500 modular buildings across 21 Indian states and parts of Africa. Its projects now extend beyond disaster relief into healthcare, construction, agriculture and enterprise applications. The company has around 80 employees and works with more than 300 subcontracting partners.
But even as the projects have changed, Shreeram says the toughest challenge still appears in places where construction itself is difficult. “Construction is so hard in rural, remote places,” says Shreeram. “So how do we make things in a factory, make them portable, take them there and set them up in a few hours or a few days?”
People gather outside a Modulus facility, part of the company’s work in community infrastructure.
Perhaps the clearest answer comes after the installation team leaves.
A patient walking into a ward in Mon does not need to know how the building was folded, transported or assembled. They need a bed. A doctor needs a room to work in. A community needs the space to be there when it is needed.
For Shreeram and Gobi, that is where all the engineering begins to matter.
A healthcare worker attends to a patient inside one of Modulus Housing’s medical facilities.
When the building reaches the people waiting for it, it can simply become part of their everyday life.
