AEC Landscape and Technology Adoption in India

India has been a lot in the news lately as one of the key destinations for outsourcing and offshoring business. The availability of a highly skilled workforce that speaks English fluently and costs a lot less to support than its counterpart in the US and European countries has made India a very attractive option. The boom started primarily with software development and call centers, and is now spreading rapidly across many industries. Outsourcing hasn't been a big phenomenon in the AEC industry so far, but we are starting to hear open discussions about it in professional practice (see AECbytes Newsletter #10 describing a session on outsourcing at the recent AIA 2004 National Convention).

I am traveling in India at the moment and am witnessing first-hand the changes in the economy, infrastructure, urban landscape, lifestyle, and amenities that have been brought about by globalization in general and the recent outsourcing boom in particular. I see a frenzy of construction activity all over the cities, with projects of magnitude and complexity never seen before. I am using this opportunity to visit local architectural, engineering, and construction firms to study how the outsourcing and construction boom is impacting them, how they are adapting to the increased competition from global firms, and how their adoption of technology is changing, if at all. This issue of the AECbytes newsletter provides a broad overview of the construction boom and the changing architectural landscape of India, and explores whether the technology adoption in the AEC industry is keeping up with the challenges of its frenzied construction activity.

The Construction Boom

India has a population of more than 1 billion, and its GDP has been growing at a steady pace for several years now. A recent report by the Asian Development Bank pegged India's economic growth at 7.4 per cent for 2004 and said that high growth is likely to be sustained in the medium term. Much of this economic upswing can be attributed to the liberalization policies that were set in place over a decade ago, and more recently by the tremendous success of India's information technology (IT) industry. A growing number of multi-nationals are setting up offices in the country and most of the major technology companies of the world have already established a presence here. Jobs are plentiful—I find the employment section of the local newspapers as weighty as those I found back in California in the US during the Internet boom of the 1990's. An increasing number of foreign nationals are arriving here to work, and many Indian expatriates are also choosing to return and take advantage of the growing professional opportunities in their home country.

This has led to a construction boom unparalleled in the history of the country in terms of sheer scale, complexity, and quality. Billboards advertising new residential and commercial complexes are all over the cities, and the newspapers are also full of ads of residential and real estate listings. Most of the big cities including Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Delhi are developing IT hubs in the suburbs—mini-cities specifically designed to house the offices of high-tech companies and residences for their employees. There is also a surge in retail development. Shopping malls, previously unheard of in India, are sprouting up like mushrooms (see a recent article on this mall boom). Another relatively new phenomenon is the cinema multiplex, which is rapidly replacing the single-screen theatre of yesteryears. In many instances, the new shopping malls come integrated with a 3 or 4 screen multiplex, providing consumers with a shopping, dining, and entertainment outing that can easily span several hours. The boom in business has also led to an increase in tourism, and resorts are another common building type being developed in large numbers. There are also entire new townships and cities being planned from scratch to cater to tourists as well as business professionals, for example, the Sahara Lake City close to Mumbai that is attempting to offer the "world's best living."

In addition to the sheer volume and variety of construction, what is also very striking is the marked difference in the style and quality of these new buildings. The designs are more adventurous, stylish, and daring. Commercial complexes are adopting the international glass-and-metal look in an attempt to look and feel global and provide a familiar environment to the foreign and the expatriate Indian clientele (for example, see an image of the DLF Gateway Tower in Gurgaon). Many of these buildings are reviled by the local architectural media as being unsuited to the local climate as well as alien to the Indian culture, but as the developers of these buildings point out, "this is what sells." Shopping malls being a totally new building type here, there are no rules or precedents to follow, and the designs are bold and eye-catching. I visited a few recently built shopping malls in Bangalore and Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi, and found them indistinguishable from the best malls I've seen in countries around the world, complete with alluring shop fronts, atriums, elevators, escalators, food courts, shopping carts, et al. Building maintenance, formerly the bane of Indian architecture, has been given a priority in these new constructions and is very much on par with international standards.

India is a vast country where many people still live below the poverty line. It will take many years for the slums to disappear completely and for the overall grubby look of the old building stock that was poorly designed and badly maintained to get updated. Still, the pace of change has definitely accelerated, and there are an increasing number of places in the cities where the ambience matches that of any top-class city of the world.

Limited Range of Technology Adoption

Needless to say, this construction boom is a bonanza for anyone working in the construction industry in India. Most AEC firms are overloaded with work, and many of them are rapidly expanding their workforce to meet the increased demand on their services. While established firms are continuing to do well, the timing has been particularly good for many small start-up firms that have innovative design ideas and are seeing a market ready to execute them. I met several firms who have grown from 2 or 3 founders to 40 or 50 people in a span of just 4 or 5 years.

For a country with a booming economy, a construction industry growing at breakneck speed, and a leadership position in the global IT industry, the overall technology adoption level in the AEC industry is surprisingly low. Pockets of manual drafting still exist, and a firm that does not have any drafting boards at all considers itself high-tech. AutoCAD is all-pervasive, with 2D drafting very much the norm. 3D modeling is catching on but is mostly used for generating glossy renderings for clients rather than for designing per se. In this realm, 3DS Max appears to rule. Some firms work with it in-house, while others prefer to outsource this work to specialized firms offering visualization services. The principals of design firms mostly design using paper and pen, and physical models are still very much in use. Most people I spoke to had never heard of applications such as SketchUp, Piranesi, form•Z, and other design tools. The BIM (building information modeling) concept was also new to most people, although Autodesk has started a campaign to promote awareness of BIM and introduce Autodesk Revit to its AEC customers. ArchiCAD, Bentley's Building solutions, and VectorWorks ARCHITECT are just starting to emerge. Reliance on postal and courier services to ship drawings has reduced considerably with the use of e-mail to exchange drawing files. However, the use of project websites like Autodesk Buzzsaw, Constructware, and so on to serve as a central repository for project-related information is still an alien concept. For structural analysis, STAAD-3 is a common application, and most other tasks such as project management, schedules, estimation, and so on are done on a piecemeal basis using solutions like Microsoft Excel.

There are two main reasons for the low-tech state of the AEC industry in India. First, there is a general lack of awareness of new tools and technologies for building design and construction. There is no dedicated technology publication serving the building industry, and while there are several architectural publications, their technology coverage is either minimal or altogether non-existent. Second, drafting labor is in ample supply, and labor costs are very cheap in comparison to the cost of software. While some vendors are pricing their software down to the value of the local currency, many vendors are not, and the dollar value of the cost of an application can be prohibitive. Not surprisingly, software piracy is rampant, and many firms openly admit to using pirated copies of applications.

However, all this may soon change. The same globalization trend that has fuelled the construction boom in India has also thrown open its doors to global architecture, engineering, and construction firms. While many of these firms are collaborating with local firms on local projects, they are also very often directly competing with other Indian firms, particularly for large and prestigious projects. This competition is only going to grow in the future, and Indian AEC firms will find that they will have to double up and get quickly up to speed on current technological trends to stay in the race. Also, they will have to overhaul their office standards and legalize their software if they have to compete on international-level projects. As the rest of the world moves away from 2D drafting and adopts more intelligent applications to design, build, and operate buildings, India is soon going to wake up and look for alternatives to AutoCAD, pirated or not. It's a nascent technology market, but just about ready to explode.

Note: For a good overview of India's construction boom, see this article.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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