Considering the current urban setup, trenchless technology has huge advantages over conventional methods.

Dr. Niranjan Swarup, Director General, Indian Society for Trenchless Technology (IndSTT)

With increasing initiatives on construction of smart cities, rural connectivity and power to all, how do you look at India as a promising market for trenchless technology?

No doubts, the prospects are good, current trenchless applications, unfortunately, are restricted to optic fiber and oil & gas industry only. Another limiting condition is our attention towards existing infrastructure that is aging quite fast. Sadly, we are not paying due attention to such utility networks. Trenchless technology is the only logical and practical solution for arresting such aging. Implications of such ignorance’s are evident all through the urban areas housing such buried structures (e.g. water contamination, leakages, NRW, road cave-ins, potholes, frequent water logging, urban flooding, unfortunate deaths of sewer workers etc.) and it is the society who is paying for it both economically and socially.

You will be amazed to note that US had planned to invest more than US$234 billion of capital expenditure (2019 -2028) to address their aging municipal water & wastewater pipe network infrastructure. Precipitated by decades of underinvestment, municipal utilities are under increasing pressure to address deteriorating linear assets at a faster pace. They are also investing US$33 million to develop natural gas transmission pipeline retrofitting technology to rehabilitate existing cast iron and bare steel pipes by creating new, robust pipes inside of old ones. Majority of these work will be done by trenchless technology due to their robust policy framework. So, you can only imagine the size of utilities rehabilitation market in India, where most of our existing network is quite old specially that of metro cities.

What are the latest technologies in the trenchless equipment market to ensure trouble-free and safe operations?

One of the biggest misconception about trenchless is the assumption that it is HDD business alone. Most of the stakeholders assumes trenchless technology means HDD only which is not the case. Trenchless technology offers much more. It provides solutions throughout the life cycle of a utility network that is from cradle to grave. It provides complete solutions for Pipeline Integrity Management. Its application starts from planning, surveying the area to find out the existing utility network for the safer installation of new utilities, to inspecting the existing utility network to decide whether it require rehabilitation or renewal to finally the replacement of dilapidated ones.

There are many new technologies to map our existing utility network and that too precisely. Then there are technologies which can tell us what is the current state of our existing network which is very important because only then one can select between rehabilitation and replacement or creating an entirely new pipeline option. This decision is extremely important. It would be economical and prudent to rehabilitate a portion of utility rather than laying down a whole new utility. Remember as underground space is vital and finite, we should use it in a sustainable manner.

More often, utilities can be made good by point repairs or localized repairs. It is not that a whole pipeline gets deteriorate overnight. It is a continuous process. Every pipeline failure problem starts with minor issues and that gets aggravated over a period of time. So, if we could develop a mechanism for their periodic condition assessment then we might even need not to rehabilitate a whole pipeline. A stitch in time saves nine. We can rectify it by addressing those minor repairs for which many solutions are available. These solutions can do the job within a day for which we face road blocks and traffic divergence of weeks due to our current practices and lack of policy framework.

How do you look at the advantages of using trenchless versus the conventional methods in terms of savings time and cost?

Considering current urban setup, trenchless technology has huge advantages over conventional methods. While it will appear expensive in context of project cost in comparison to conventional method, it is economical as it is less disruptive, environment friendly and is characterized by low social cost. Imagine how much of pollution, traffic chaos, hardship for the society and waste of energy, a section of road or street closed for a week for a pipeline work, will generate in contrast to trenchless technology, where you need to have only two pits for the same job. If we could assess the social cost of a project, the trenchless technology solution will always be more viable than the conventional method. So, definitely trenchless is a much better option than conventional method in the urban areas.

While trenchless technology is a revolutionary engineering, its application is still limited; what hurdles and challenges do you see in the growth of this industry and what kind of support are you looking for from the government?

First hurdle is lack of will power and responsibility on the part of utility owners. We never heard of any action taken against the engineers and officials responsible for the integrity of the pipeline, when our roads settled due to leaking pipeline, when we have road accidents due to potholes on our roads, or when road and streets just logged of sewer and rain water due to clogged pipelines, and more tragically, not even when a sewer worker dies while cleaning it. Trenchless Technology provide sustainable solutions for all these issues. The only end condition is that we must be willing to implement them.

Second hurdle is budget constraints. It is true that application of trenchless technology is expensive in comparison to conventional methods. But this is largely because we import these technologies. Another factor here is lack of enough competition for a particular technique in the market. For example, when HDD came to India its unit rate was somewhere around INR 10000 per meter which has come down to INR 200 per meter, while for microtunneling it is yet to mature on similar lines. This has happened due to increase in competition in HDD market. In order to grow the competition in other techniques, we need to cultivate new players in the sector. For that utility owners need to adopt other techniques in a substantive manner to ensure the business for more prospective players.

Third and most important hurdle is lack of knowledge of new techniques. IndSTT annually organizes its flagship event No Dig India Show in which we invite global technology provider to showcase their latest product and technologies. This show provides platforms for ingress of such technologies in India. This could be used to advantage of both the private sector participants as well as utility owners. The willingness to learn new technologies is the key to success.

We would like to take this opportunity to invite all our stakeholders to this year No Dig India Show scheduled on 8th & 9th December at Chennai Trade Centre, Chennai, Tamil Nadu to join the show and get the first-hand knowledge of the latest technology for the development and management of our buried utilities.

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