Seminar and Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing and Community Improvement: This photograph, taken before the Exhibition opened, shows the village health clinic under construction
Seminar and Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing and Community Improvement: This photograph, taken before the Exhibition opened, shows the village health clinic under construction: More than 30,000 people have been crowding daily to see a model village which has sprung up during the past few months on the outskirts of India's capital, New Delhi. Built almost under the shadow of the vast walls of Purana Quila, old Delhi’s fifteenth-century fortress, this village of 80 homes is one of the major features of the International Exhibition on Low-cost Housing - first of its kind in the world - which the Indian Government organized to coincide with the recent United Nations Regional Seminar on Housing and Community Improvement which opened on 21 January and ended on 17 February 1954. The village is modest and simple, with a health clinic and school, a cooperative store, carpenter's shop and smithy, properly planned streets, adequate water supply, lighting, drainage and a village centre adequately equipped for communal activities. The houses are adapted to their environment and so planned that each family unit will find dignity and privacy in its home. Yet none costs more than 5,000 rupees - a little over 1,000 dollars and many costs a great deal less. The whole project is an eloquently practical demonstration of what “aided self-help” can do toward overcoming the gigantic housing problems of under-developed countries. 
Seminar and Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing and Community: H.E. Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India as he visited the "model village", with U.N. technical assistance expert, Miss Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, who directed the Seminar at New Dehli, India
Seminar and Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing and Community: H.E. Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India as he visited the "model village", with U.N. technical assistance expert, Miss Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, who directed the Seminar at New Dehli, India A United Nations Regional Seminar on Housing and Community Improvement opened in New Delhi on 21 January and ended on 17 February 1954. In conjunction with the Seminar, the Indian Government organized an International Exhibition on Low-cost Housing, one of the major features of which was a "model village", properly planned for community life, in which none of the houses cost more than 5,000 rupees - the equivalent of a little more than 1,000 dollars. Included in the "village" was a replica of the hut in which Gandhi lived and worked.

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