Is India's construction industry ready to build smart cities?

India has witnessed rapid urban transformation in the recent decades and the ongoing smart cities initiative by the central government has added new thrust to this change. In the ideal sense, smart cities will enhance the quality of living for citizens by using cutting-edge information and communication technologies to manage civic assets and resources efficiently.

The application of technology is expected to transform civic administration and governance and provisioning of utilities including electricity, water and sanitation, along with ensuring efficient management of traffic and transport systems. A strong civic infrastructure lies at the core of most of these services and this includes residential and commercial buildings.

Smart buildings and structures therefore become a vital ingredient of smart cities. Further, ecological sustainability is a key requirement of modern smart cities. India’s construction industry, given the role it will play in building smart cities, must evolve and start embracing advanced construction technologies. Below are three important technologies for constructing smart and sustainable buildings:

Prefabricated Structures

Precast or prefabricated construction is a modern technique where major elements of a building or a structure, including floors, walls and roofs, are manufactured in a factory and then simply ‘assembled’ on site. Nearly all metro projects, including Delhi Metro and Bangalore Metro, have used Precast or Prefabricated structures, and as a consequence their actual construction has never lagged behind deadlines. Use of precast construction has reportedly helped in saving almost 60% of time in completion of projects (as compared to the conventional construction methods) and has also brought down costs by 10-15%.

This technique has today emerged as a preferred and promising alternative to the conventional concrete-based construction practices for speed, accuracy and higher quality. Prefabricated structures are more durable as they are manufactured under controlled conditions and under strict guidelines. Since the modules are factory-built, there are no problems faced when it comes to quality control, placement problems or untimely deliveries.

Needless to say, prefabricated buildings are likely to play a key role in keeping the smart cities project on track, both in terms of cost and time.

Constructible BIM

Construction is a complex process. To convert an architect’s plan into a built structure requires great precision, which can be achieved by using BIM or Building Information Modeling. BIM enables the creation and management of accurate, detailed, highly constructible 3D structural models which help in visualization of a project from its conception till the end. Detailed BIM models can test the constructability of a building in advance to make sure that errors, rework, wastage is minimised and the project is predictably profitable.

India generates a huge construction waste annually. This also amounts to huge losses for the contractors, which makes the cost of construction higher. By using BIM, it is possible to estimate the exact amount of material required and thus wastage can be reduced to negligible amounts. Adopting constructible BIM to build new structures for the smart cities will thus save both time and money.

Internet of Things

While all the other industries are realizing the true potential of IoT, the construction industry is yet to do so. The growth of smart buildings calls for robust automation of building assets through an IoT-enabled system of connected sensors, which will allow construction workers, machinery and materials to ‘talk’ to a central data platform, which will capture critical performance parameters.

While IOT is useful during the construction of a building, its value is fully realized when a building is in actual use. Sensors embedded in a building’s elements like ventilation or air conditioning ducts, elevators and escalators can monitor patterns and raise alerts in critical stress situations. If abnormal patterns are detected in any structure, building maintenance can be triggered automatically to intervene before an actual failure happens. Using IOT, building collapses can be avoided or predicted beforehand; ensuring zero loss of human lives.

Embedded sensors and connected devices in construction equipment and the intelligence derived from these devices has been successfully deployed for creating intelligent and green buildings and has also limited the amount of construction waste generated.

With the government pushing for adoption of technology in the construction sector, the onus is now on the industry to embrace cutting edge technologies and practices in order to play a judicious role in India’s urban transformation.

Rajan Aiyer, Managing Director, Trimble, SAARC Region, says, "To build the next generation cities, India’s construction industry needs to adopt new-age construction technology solutions, and these solutions are already being used extensively globally. In turn, using the right technology will lead to astute planning, better utilisation of resources, lower project costs and timely completion of projects, something that our smart cities require, and our construction industry will find very useful.” Trimble is a leading construction technology solutions company and its products have been used in construction of various metro and airport projects (including Delhi metro, Navi Mumbai station development, Chennai airport expansion etc.), and also by various government bodies, including Railways.