GTUNGI

If you are not a civil architect or a professional in the domain of town planning and construction, you are likely to find it tough to identify requirements and creating suitable specs for various facilities which should be built in a new campus of a university. It is a complex task. Recently I went through such an exercise for my university. This was a team effort with couple of my colleagues ( all of us are members of faculty in different engineering departments of our university ) -- none of us were into civil architecture or anything resembling it. I will share my views and experiences about this exercise. First question that may come to one's mind is: " should I really be part of such an exercise? what's there in it for me? " This is a normal thought :) As far I'm concerned, I chose to be part of this exercise because: a) I genuinely wanted to contribute towards building our institute b) the proposals and ideas that were being put forth about facilities in

During an informal conversation over chai  last week some colleagues made not very kind remarks about the manner in which administration in my university had lately been handling the campus development project. My colleagues were apprehensive about the abilities of a particular architect firm who along with all its  allied firms/subsidiaries  had been black-listed by AAI  for non-performance. This presumably non-performer architect firm has been hired by our administration. Also was in doubt the abilities of CPWD to deliver on this project of "national importance". Reputation of CPWD has not been that good on delivering projects. It is not uncommon to hear about contractor firms who simply refuse to take up work when they learn that it is handled by CPWD. Role of PMC is very crucial to such mega projects: onus of ensuring that the contractor builds a good quality infrastructure that meets the client's requirements lies mainly on the PMC. When client administration s