Editorial

“By guess and by God” with a little luck is this the state of affairs in trenchless sector?

While writing this editorial I am recalling an article written by Late J.B. Bony, President and Chairman, Morrison-Kundsen Company Inc., Idaho, on the basics of contracting. As per that article contractor is a man who takes contracts, and a successful contractor is one who makes money on them. Unlike older times, courage, optimism and willingness to work are no longer enough to assure success in contracting today. The new breed of contractor and all of his staff must have knowledge and great competence in many fields. Rapidly growing knowledge must be acquired and retained and used to have a well rounded and successful. No longer it is possible to run a construction company “by guess and by God” with a little luck.

Trenchless Techniques evolved from the Underground section of Construction industry by miniaturizing the equipment or substituting smaller parts for the larger components. Initially Indian operations were being conducted in the above manner. But with expanding demands and availability of newer and better working machines this no longer is the situation. Today the contractor has access to equipment which can perform in a much controlled manner and the terms guess and luck becomes things of past. Yes end conditions are there what is the lot operating these machines. Is this lot tested and certified? Our guess is that no, it is not. So where does this take us, back to guess and luck.

We need to correct this situation. When we do not permit unlicensed workers to lay water supply lines and sewer lines, when we do not permit similar workers to prepare the electrical networks in our houses or urban areas, why is that we let an unlicensed operator to run a HDD rig? The rig under his operation is expected to perform in a state-of-art manner but when failures occur the natural reaction is that subsurface constructions are risky and we talk about Act of God is it really the act of God?

One always tends to forget that the chances of success are directly proportional to the skills of the operators. We have boiler licenses, welder licenses even vehicle driving licenses both for heavy as well as light duty but still permit unlicensed HDD drillers to operate, exposing the machines and the existing subsurface networks to unimaginable risks. Is it correct?

True, most of the service providers claim to have a well qualified and experienced team of professionals for a hassle free operation. But qualifications from where, experience on what grounds? Has it been verified by an independent evaluator? In India it has not been. The sole reason is the absence of a regulatory system for accreditation of such professionals.

As a first step IndSTT, the apex organization to promote the application of Trenchless Technology in India and SAARC region, has initiated the process of standardizing the skills of HDD operators. In this process of testing and certification of drillers the educational, technical and operational skills of HDD operators would be tested and certified. The genesis of the concept came from the article on the same topic published in the last issue of NDI which got one of the primary stakeholder interested and IndSTT upon his request has developed standards to evaluate the competency levels of existing drillers. Ongoing activities of the JNURM task force also are acting as an accelerator to this endeavor as the standards are also proposed to be provided to these constituents so that they can regulate their own areas and enforce compliance.

Under this endeavor IndSTT has constituted a working group who have evaluated the standards and finalized them. Based on these standards testing and certification process is now going to be initiated. In this process the working group constituents would be involved in the testing exercise based on the question bank already prepared. Drillers displaying the minimum competency levels would be certified as qualified drillers. Such drillers would have the qualification certificates permitting them to operate as the drillers till the validity of these renewable certificates. JNURM cities naturally are going to be the identified areas where these certificates are going to be a mandatory requirement and a proposal to this effect is already in motion.

Benefits of this process are immense as a qualified and competent driller would take all the necessary precautions while conducting the subsurface utility inspections, route planning, pilot drilling, backreaming, disposing the soil and the drilling fluid all of these actions can lead to unwanted accidents, damages to the existing infrastructure and also to the rigs. Imagine the cost nation pays when a drilling machine punctures a gas pipeline leading to gas linked fire. Damages to optic fibre cables or electrical cables warrant such type of regulations and therefore the endeavor.

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