Gaurav Sehrawat
Director, Rana Infra · Profile
Most buyers walk into a builder floor and look up. The double-height drawing room, the balcony, the light coming off the west side. It is a reasonable thing to do — those are the rooms you are buying.
I still start in the basement. It is not a sales technique, and it has cost me deals. But it is the most honest twenty minutes we can spend together, because the basement is where a building in Delhi declares how it will age.
Here is what a basement actually has to do.
It has to resist water from below — the water table, which in parts of South Delhi sits closer than people expect, and which rises after a heavy monsoon. It has to resist water from the sides, which comes off the setback ground and any adjoining plot. It has to hold the sump, the pumps, and the invert levels that make the drainage work. And it has to do all of this permanently, under a building that will not be opened up again.
That is a lot of responsibility for the one part of the building nobody photographs.
The three things I show a buyer are not glamorous:
The joint between the floor slab and the wall. This is where water gets in, almost always. Not through the concrete — through the change of plane. If it has been detailed as a proper cove rather than a right angle, and the membrane has been carried up the wall rather than stopped at the floor, you can see it and you can trust it. If it has been done quickly, you can usually see that too.
The sump. Where it is, how it is accessed, whether a pump can be replaced without breaking the floor, and whether the electrical point serving it sits above the flood level. A sump that needs the floor opened to service it is a design failure that will be paid for by whoever owns the building in ten years.
The drainage fall. Ask to see how water leaves the basement. If the answer involves a pump doing work that gravity should be doing, that pump will fail at some point in the building’s life, and it will probably fail during a monsoon.
None of this is technically complicated. All of it is easy to skip, because a buyer will not ask, and because doing it properly costs money that does not show in photographs.
This is the part of the business where the incentives are genuinely aligned with the buyer, and where a developer’s real standard is visible. Anyone can buy Italian marble. Anyone can install a good chandelier. Those are purchases. The basement is a decision about whether you expect to be answerable to this buyer in year seven.
So when someone comes to see one of our floors, I take them down first. If they are not interested in the basement, that is useful information for both of us. If they are, we usually have a good conversation about what they actually want to buy — which is not square feet, but a building that behaves.
That is the whole point. A floor is not a product you buy once. It is a building you live inside for a decade, and the basement is where it decides whether that decade is quiet or expensive.
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Gaurav Sehrawat is a director at Rana Infra, building independent floors in Vasant Kunj, Vasant Enclave and Nangal Dewat since 2003. More about him.
