For villagers living around the hill station of Lonavala, about 70 miles outside Bombay, the phenomenon of “blitz building” was a new one.

Throw in a former US president, a Hollywood star, an ex-Australian cricket captain and hundreds of foreigners in hard hats and the result was bemusement for the average rural Indian.

Sadhiya Sheikh, 30, admitted she had never heard the name Jimmy Carter until the day the 82-year-old started building the wall of her new house in the tiny village of Malavli. What she made of Brad Pitt — staying in nearby Poona where his girlfriend Angelina Jolie is making a film — pitching up unannounced with a hammer in his hand was unclear. She and 99 other families, though, will soon be moving from mud huts to brick houses thanks to an annual project led by Mr Carter and his wife, Rosalynn.

“We would never have managed to build or own a home of our own,” Mrs Sheikh said. “We won’t be disturbed by the noise of others or be at the mercy of landlords. We will be able to live as we choose.”

While the celebrities dip in and out, there are more than 2,000 volunteers from 40 countries clocking gruelling hours in 35C (95F) heat to complete 100 homes in just five days. The “blitz build”, which ends today, involves crews lifting blocks, hammering girders and priming woodwork on rows of identical 350sq ft (30sq m)houses.

Two months of preparation work laid the foundations, including storm drains to deal with the monsoons, but the volunteers have created homes for the poor from the first bricks up to the corrugated steel roofs.

“We are so used to getting these things done by our labour classes but this is tough work. I am going to have respect for them from now on,” Zunaira Hijazi, a 20-year-old student from Lahore, in Pakistan, said.

It is the first time Mr Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has brought his 23-year-old housebuilding mission to India and the event is being used as a launch pad by Habitat for Humanity, a US-based group, for a $100 million (£52 million) campaign to rehouse 50,000 low-income families by 2010.

“About 315 million people need adequate housing in India and the gap keeps widening,” Peter Selvarajan, the chief executive of Habitat for Humanity India, said. “We are not even scratching the surface but every mass movement has started in a small way.”

The scale of the building site and the complexity of the support services suggest that the project has already taken on big proportions. Like a well- organised global sports event or music festival, there are VIP and media tents, ranks of portable lavatories and a tent where more than 2,000 meals are served up three times a day to labourers whose day jobs include investment banking. Some volunteers have had the $800 entrance fee, flight and accommodation paid for by their employers, but most are there under their own steam.

Shayne Kelly, a 60-year-old nurse from Adelaide, paid A$3,000 (£1,200) to toil alongside Steve Waugh, the former Australian cricket captain.

“I retired to do things like this,” she said. “I’ve had a good life and this is one way to help those who struggle to get anywhere.”

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