Gaurav Sehrawat
Director, Rana Infra · Profile
Quality is a word that has been used so often in Indian real estate that it has stopped carrying information. Every brochure says it. Every site hoarding claims it. So let me describe what it looks like on an actual site, in millimetres and in arguments.
A door frame arrives. The opening is 20mm out — wider at the top than the bottom, because the mason worked off a line that had drifted and nobody caught it. Twenty millimetres is about the thickness of a finger. You cannot see it standing in the room.
You have two options. You pack the frame with filler and move on, and in three years the door will not latch properly and someone will open it with a shoulder. Or you break out the reveal, re-plumb the opening, and lose two days and some money.
We break it out. Every time. Not because we are noble, but because the filler solution is a debt, and the person who pays it is the buyer in year four.
That is what quality control actually is: a set of decisions about who absorbs a cost, made dozens of times a week, mostly when nobody is watching.
Some things we check as a matter of routine, because they are the ones that fail silently:
Slopes. Every terrace, every balcony, every bathroom floor has to fall to a drain. A floor that is level looks perfect and pools water. We check with a spirit level and then we flood it.
Waterproofing continuity. The failure is never the membrane. It is the joint where the membrane meets a wall, a pipe, or a drain. Those junctions get inspected before the screed goes down, because after it goes down, you are guessing.
Service routing. A duct that runs 4 metres horizontally before it turns upward will clog. It is drawn that way because it is easier to draw. It is built that way because nobody stopped it.
The basement, after the first monsoon. I have said this elsewhere and I will keep saying it: water tells you the truth faster than any snag list. You look at the walls and the floor before anyone cleans up, and the building tells you what it thinks of your waterproofing.
None of this requires extraordinary skill. It requires somebody with authority to be on site, to say stop, and to accept the cost of stopping.
Which is the part most builders get wrong, and it is not a technical failure. It is an organisational one. If the person who can say “break it out” is three phone calls away from the site, the answer will always be filler. The distance between the decision-maker and the slab is the single biggest predictor of quality I know.
We do not subcontract accountability. We subcontract work constantly — that is how construction works. But the person who answers when something is wrong is us, on site, with our name on the gate.
So when a buyer asks me whether our buildings are good, I do not talk about finishes. I tell them to come to a site on a Tuesday afternoon and watch what happens when something is 20mm out. That tells you everything, and it cannot be printed in a brochure.
—
Gaurav Sehrawat is a director at Rana Infra, building independent floors in Vasant Kunj, Vasant Enclave and Nangal Dewat since 2003. More about him.
