Building sites

It is always interesting to see Indian building sites and to compare them to Swiss standards. The differences couldn't be bigger!

It starts with the number of employed laborers: for a huge building like the newly built Bühler application lab at least 100 to 200 workers were involved every day. The grade of mechanization is generally very low; whenever something can be done by hand, it will be done by hand. Machines like excavators or cranes seem to be more expensive than employing some more workforce. People dig big holes or foundation trenches by hand, women haul building material into the 5th floor on their head or back, trestles - which normally are wooden constructions - are built in highly dangerous maneuvers etc.

A cleaning equip, which tries to get master of produced waste and dust, is always part of a building site. At this point the Indian broom has to be mentioned. I have never seen such an unpractical tool: it basically consists of the front part of a broom we are all used to. Now imagine all these poor women bending down to whip the floor...

Unfortunately the dust is normally rather moved to some other place instead of removing it. Thus, you can be sure that some hours later the wind will do its work and the same dust will cover the whole place again.

Even for building a normal house, at least a whole family is employed. Next to the Guesthouse a house is built and the builder family is living directly at the building site in a small and improvised hut. They don't have access to neither sanitary facilities nor drinking water. Witnessing these huge economical differences make me thoughtful and I would have never expected that wealthy and poor people live so near together.

Paint-jobs are another aspect of building worth mentioning: I have the feeling that the quantity of paint is the essential factor and wins over quality. Instead of a proper surface-treatment before painting, the laborers just try to fill all the cracks and gaps with paint; they don't even hesitate to paint wet walls. Covering surfaces, which should not be painted, is not done either; instead people will try to remove excess paint and splatters with strong solvents. You can imagine the result yourself!

The following pictures cannot show the whole story:

The house which is built next to the Guesthouse

Laborers must be tough guys to trust these a wooden construction. At least you can read the predominant wind direction from this trestle ;-).