House Lifting Services in Assam Puranigudam Minar, as the locals call it, stands tall in a dusty by lane of Nagaon. Situated inside the Puranigudam Masjid, built in 1824, the turret was about to be demolished to make way for a highway expansion project. The people of Purunigudam, cutting across religious lines, would not let that happen. In 2015, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) proposed expansion of NH-37 into a four-lane highway. The Minar was in its way. A few concerned locals, both Hindus and Muslims, approached the district administration with a memorandum to preserve the Minar, but the NHAI and public works department said moving it would be difficult. Not relenting, some of them started a crowdfunding initiative. Soon, their campaign caught the attention of an engineering firm based in Haryana. “We proposed a technique called lifting-and-shifting... We lift the structure from its base, using plate rollers, and move it,” explained Gurdeep Chauhan, the...