For those engaged in the production of India's buildings, it's akin to seeing the warming water boiling the frogs
India is building at an unprecedented scale but its highly fragmented construction industry is struggling to cope, writes Amit Khanna.
Two billion square feet, probably closer to three billion.
When estimating the quantity of civic urban infrastructure that India needs to build over the next few decades, the rounding error often exceeds the total built volume of entire countries. States plan their schools by the thousands, home subsidies by the millions. Road construction is measured in kilometres per day.
India's need for buildings is not an academic projection. Millions are phasing from subsistence to consumption and the country's cities are woefully inadequate to handle the mass of humanity heading their way every year.
The sheer will and effort required to build in this country is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous
The government and private players are building as quickly as they can, yet the demand keeps coming. From afar, it seems like those in the industry have the proverbial golden goose.
However, for those of us engaged in the production of these buildings, it's akin to seeing the warming water slowly boiling the frogs. The sheer will and effort required to build in this country – even at the very apex of luxury residential – is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous.
For all its size, the industry's foundational weakness remains its workforce. There is a massive shortage of skill across the spectrum of the industry, both at the building site and in the office. Supervisors, engineers and project managers are in particularly short supply.
The person delivering tiles will not send enough people to offload a truckload's worth of tiles in a single day, so the truck sits on the street overnight. The electrical contractor will brief his team on the work to be done, and share PDF copies over WhatsApp, but the worker will arrive at the site with his phone fully discharged, and wait till lunch for the visit from his supervisor.
The carpenter crew will consist of one new person and he will waste material trying to make something he simply didn't bother to look hard enough for. At the showroom, the manufacturer won't stock the accessories to match the main products. And it goes on and on.
A sector that should be a ladder to the middle class is instead an informal, unstable world where skill rarely translates to security. Training, where it exists, is shallow and cursory, with companies preferring to poach talent rather than building in-house capabilities from the ground up.
It can seem like India's construction industry functions much like a bazaar
At the bottom of the pyramid, the true builders of India live in a cycle of migration, urban precarity and low bargaining power. Women, despite being indispensable on many sites, remain invisible in skill programmes and leadership roles.
Formalisation has happened at the corporate level, but rarely reaches the people who mix the mortar, with the result that India's workforce is good enough to build fast, but not always to build well. On most sites, quality varies not by product batch, but by who showed up that day.
At one of India's most respected developers, managers have come up with a unique solution. Workers are greeted at site every morning with a cup of hot sweet tea (which is much like a Red Bull with its effective combination of sugar and caffeine) and a samosa. The ritual repeats at four in the afternoon, helping to shake off the post-lunch stupor.
Other large firms have started installing Wi-Fi at site to allow workers to video call home during their lunch breaks. However, loyalty remains a low priority for workers, and consistent outcomes are still a challenge.
In what may seem a harsh indictment, it can seem like India's construction industry functions much like a bazaar. Project delivery is sliced and sub-sliced until no single entity carries knowledge from one site to another.
Informal networks are far more important than formal systems, and relationships outweigh records as migrant workers change phone numbers and addresses. The national identification system, Aadhaar, coupled with a tax identity has vastly improved reliability, but there are still far more that live outside the system than within it.
The common feeling is that the profits to be had from this boom are coming at a significant cost
In this environment, opportunism routinely beats long-term thinking. It is obviously difficult for contractors to invest in procurement systems, quality controls and safety equipment when the daily effort is still about bringing the right person to the site.
The industry pays heavily for this fragmentation, with a poor reputation for contractors across the board. Apart from the cliches about cost overruns, contractors are seen as lacking the necessary organisational ability to deliver projects on time.
From a client's perspective, the lack of single-stop shops to deliver projects can be incredibly frustrating. Having to secure multiple contractors to complete a single building project is perplexing and often enough, when no one owns the full picture, no one owns the responsibility.
In recent times, architects have picked up the gauntlet, organising complete design-build practices, consolidating hundreds of suppliers and contractors to deliver small-scale projects. At the other end of the spectrum, consulting firms have started acting as integrated project delivery teams, pulling together a consortium of consultants, contracting firms and suppliers.
Nevertheless, within the industry the common feeling is that the profits to be had from this boom are coming at a significant cost, and that perhaps there are better avenues for deploying capital within the Indian economy.
The lack of oversight is also storing up significant problems for India's future. Integrated design, where mobility, water, ecology and community needs are planned together, is still an exception rather than a rule.
Beneath the spectacle of cranes and concrete lies a sector struggling with old habits
A flood-prone city may receive a new network of highways but no analysis for drainage management. A new township built over hundreds of acres arrives before the city can provide the sewerage and water supply systems.
Metro lines quickly rise before pedestrian access is imagined and while there are several examples of great outcomes, they are often not in the public domain. In Bangalore and Hyderabad, large IT firms have built world-class campuses, but civic problems persist outside the boundary walls.
When planning is fragmented, mitigation becomes expensive, resilience becomes reactive, and citizens pay the price in the long term. Delhi's pollution woes are a case in point, where the unfair bans on construction do little to clear the smoky air, but cause massive disruptions to labour and workflow.
Unsurprisingly, few projects measure the emissions associated with material manufacturing, transport, site waste, and envelope performance. It's a situation exacerbated by the rise of conspicuous consumption, especially in the premium housing and commercial sectors, with their focus on imported materials and decorative excess packaged as luxury.
Unless builders learn to count carbon as seriously as they count cost, the building boom will lock the country into decades of high emissions.
India is building at a pace unmatched in its history. Highways, metros, bridges, industrial parks, luxury towers, mass housing; the landscape is being rearranged faster than most citizens or governments can process. But beneath the spectacle of cranes and concrete lies a sector struggling with old habits, uneven capacity and a future that demands far more than speed.
The cranes will keep rising. The question is whether the industry beneath them will rise too.
Amit Khanna is design principal at Amit Khanna Design Associates.
The photo is by Memories Over Mocha via Shutterstock.
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