In Nepal, the Urban and Semi-Urban areas are growing rapidly and Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings have become very popular in these areas. The data obtained from the National Population and Housing Census (CBS 2012) suggests that there are currently about 540,000 RC buildings of 3-5 stories. Over the last few decades, RC building construction in Nepal has rapidly increased whereby replacing other construction materials, like adobe, brick, and stone masonry buildings in all over the country. Most of these RC buildings are non-engineered buildings and are constructed with the involvement of masons and owners only. Non-engineered buildings have insufficient structural capacity against major threats such as earthquakes, they lack ductile detailing, have poor construction quality and limited durability. Nepal has developed building code in 1994 and announced the implementation of it in 2003. But the implementation in real practice is not effective as the involvement of engineers in construction of residential buildings is very rare and buildings are being built by owners themselves with the help of untrained masons. Generally, in the urban areas, ground floor of more than 90 of the RC buildings are open for commercial shutter or parking and the upper floor are closed with infill masonry for residential purpose. So, the construction of these kind of non-engineered buildings without considering consequences of open storey has resulted in many vulnerable buildings. In recent 2015 Gorkha Earthquake (Mw=7.9), the major loss in RC frame buildings was due to the soft storey collapse of ground floor due to reduction in strength and/or stiffness. Even though there are many existing retrofitting solutions, people are still staying in the same vulnerable buildings without retrofitting them. In this paper, a comprehensive study has been performed with the primary stakeholders involved in the construction process to understand the complication of soft storey problem in Nepal. So, the objective of this study is to understand the social need and problems in implementing retrofitting solutions in interaction and questionnaire survey with houseowners, engineers and masons/ contractors.
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