Gearing up for sustainable and eco-friendly structures

The face of the construction industry in India is getting altered, it is getting increasingly globalised day by day and Godrej construction consistently strives to inculcate global values in its construction segment.

How is Godrej Construction getting prepared for sustainable and eco-friendly structures?
Godrej has always been committed to preserving the environment and encouraging sustainable development through its Good & Green Initiative. We have recently established a fully automated recycled concrete block and paver manufacturing plant in our township at Vikhroli, Mumbai. This factory is capable of manufacturing concrete blocks and pavers using concrete waste recycled from demolished concrete structures from building and infrastructure projects, which would otherwise end up in our already overflowing city landfills. We are committed towards sustainable development. Having taken several specific steps in this direction, three of our Ready Mix Concrete (RMC) plants have recently been commended with the GreenPro certification from Indian Green Building Council (IGBC). Our products such as TUFF Recycled Concrete Blocks and AAC Blocks have also been Green Pro certified by IGBC. As a responsible industry player, we take every effort to help minimise the adverse impact of our business operations on the environment.

How do you view the indigenous construction market to the global market in terms of technology and timely execution of projects?
The adoption of RMC in India has been growing fast, however it is still at a relatively nascent stage as compared to developed nations. Hence, we will see an increase in the use of RMC and other special concrete products with niche applications in the years ahead. From technological point of view, at Godrej Construction we are constantly exploring opportunities to leverage new technologies to meet the growing expectations of our clients. One example is the Godrej RMC Mobile App, we had anticipated and developed this app much earlier in the year 2017. This mobile app enables our key clients to place their orders, track the delivery status of their orders, and monitor the location of our transit mixer trucks on a real-time basis using GPS tracking system. This, in turn, helps our client’s project engineers plan and allows them to coordinate their concreting and related construction operations on site in a much more efficient and convenient manner. It even offers them an option to provide their feedback on the quality of our products and services. All this is possible on their personal mobile smart phones having iOS, Android or Windows based operating systems.

How is Godrej Construction incorporating the global standards in its domain of construction and maintenance?
Our construction materials business has been growing at a reasonably good rate. We will continue to explore opportunities to expand our RMC operations in existing markets and in select new markets. We are working with Sintef, a Norwegian scientific research organisation, to further benchmark and improve quality management processes at our concrete recycling plant to ensure quality assurance of input raw material which is in form of concrete debris. We also benchmark the quality of our products and services with other global organisations and involve international market research firms to gather feedback from our customers to improve the quality of our products and services continually. Recently, we also conducted a preliminary benchmarking exercise through a Singapore based consulting company for assessing the quality of fit out finishes of our sample residential flats which are under construction.

Godrej Construction will continue to explore opportunities to expand its RMC operations in existing markets and in select new markets.
Anup Mathew, Senior Vice President and Business Head, Godrej Construction

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