Choosing construction technologies

'The Choice is simple Sustainable development, unsustainable development or no development at all.'
Sandy Halliday, Build Green 1990."

National Perspective
Continuing with the conventional constructional technologies for the mass housing is like burning candle from both sides. It is unsafe, polluting, wasteful and may be.... undignified for our times.
The negatives multiply in case of high rise construction wherein it is akin to burning candle from all ends. It is the root cause of the poor quality, Project Time + Cost overruns and most tragic of them all most fatal accidents. Indian construction Industry (?) can't afford to continue it  for mass construction projects.

Planetary Perspective
With the above perspective, achieving mission of Housing for all by 2022 through the present industry practices is likely to be disastrous not only for us but for the whole planet as well. For achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is imperative that we quickly adopt new and not so new technologies.


BMTPC (Building Materials And Technology Promotion Council) has published a Directory on Emerging Technologies [i] potential of which is mostly unexploited. Why we are unable to exploit work of such great value?

The cause may lie in the basics… For about a generation now, Civil Engineering unlike other branches of Engineering at IITs and other prestigious institutes have not succeeded to draw the best talent. Many of the good intentioned bright young Civil Engineers manage to stay away from the profession by diverging into more attractive professions. The remaining good lot preferring structural design is often disappointed by poor salaries.

To state that India lacks quality Civil Engineers is an understatement…On the top of it an average builder employs supervisors at site and civil engineers on paper. A visual look of most housing projects especially in NCR ( National Capital Region- Delhi) would vouch for this.

The purpose of this blog though is not analyse and lament the industry but to highlight the opportunities that lie in deploying a good team of professionals which would essentially include an Architect, MEP,Structural and Civil engineer.

FOCUS: Deciding on new construction technology with Financial Simulation.



A word of caution : All outputs are as good as the inputs and processes. The process involves expert judgement. The quantitative analysis should be preceded by qualitative analysis.  

The excel file is macro free. To Download Please click the link below.

 ROIs Using Traditional and  Improved Shuttering

  

 ROI  (Return on Investment) is easily understood even by stakeholders with no accounting background. The following required Excel skills are intuitive and can easily be learnt. It is expected that you are acquainted as how to work out the Present Value using Excel .
  1. Goal Seek
  2. Conditional Formatting
The downloadable excel workbook depicts an average scenario, Various input parameters and ROIs  shall thus both  be project and organizational dependent. 





[i] 1. http://www.bmtpc.org/DataFiles/CMS/file/BMTPC_Directory_Emerging_Technology.pdf



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