17th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction - Taipei, Taiwan - 2009

Waste in Indian Building Construction Projects

K.P. Ramaswamy1 & Satyanarayana N. Kalidindi2

1M.Tech Student, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai-600036, India, Phone +91-9940179701, [email protected]
2Professor, Building Technology & Construction Management Division, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai-600036, India, Phone +91-44-22574268, [email protected]

Abstract

The Indian construction industry is characterised by challenges such as low productivity, lack of skilled labour, time and cost overruns etc. These are associated with considerable waste present in the construction sites. An important step towards elimination of waste, is to understand and measure the amount of waste actually present in Indian construction sites. Currently there is very little documentation in literature on this issue in the Indian construction industry context. This paper aims to investigate waste in Indian construction industry, focusing mainly on building projects. Six ongoing projects were taken up for the study and the wastes identified were quantified in terms of project cost by collecting data through direct observations, records and using tools such as work sampling. The results showed that waste due to non value added activities by labour and equipment was much higher compared to material waste generated in the sites. The total cost of waste calculated as percentage of project cost, for the items studied, varied from 5.38% to 14.70% among the projects studied. However, this did not include the cost of quality deviations as this data was not documented in the sites studied.

Keywords

Lean construction, indian construction, productivity, waste, work sampling.

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Reference

Ramaswamy, K. & Kalidindi, S. N. 2009. Waste in Indian Building Construction Projects, 17th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , 3-14. doi.org/

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