Durha Infracon: young technocrats on a mission to reform infrastructure construction

$Durha Infracon: young technocrats on a mission to reform infrastructure construction$

Wednesday April 02, 2014 , 4 min Read

Founded by Anchal Saxena and Shreyansh Golchha in 2012, Durha Infracon is based in Gurgaon and is a team of eight which wants to bring a change in the way the world sees infrastructure construction. Durha Infracon is an individual entity under the Durha Construction group and classifies itself as the technological innovators for the construction industry in India.

"We got bored with the way infrastructure is seen as a slow, ponderous giant who will take years and years to finally drive our country’s industrial growth. This boredom pushed us to explore new technologies that are design centric, fast paced and modern," says Anchal. With strong mentors on board, Durha Infracon provides Innovative Construction Technologies to clients of all scales -- from mega corporations to an autowallah looking for a small house. "We saw the rising need of infrastructure development and it is pretty clear that some phenomenal technological advancement is needed in the way we construct," says Anchal.

With a requirement of ‘20 million+’ housing units and the number of slum dwellers and the homeless growing, Durha aims to provide solution to this ever growing problem. "If we talk of the financial potential for the EWS (Economical Weaker Sections) housing itself, it is a potential $264 billion business with a completion time of not more than 15 years," says Shreyansh. Durha does this by bringing in technologies like prefabrication, pre-cast construction, monolithic constructions, LGSF constructions etc. instead of the age-old methods of brick and mortar construction. There are other companies doing this but Durha wants to bring in a lean and agile system to the whole process.

The company is very young but has a clientele list which includes names such as Hiranandani Gas, L&T, Kaztroy, Monnet Ispat, etc. "We are already negotiating orders valued more than 180 crore INR with different companies and individuals across India," says Tilak. The company has also started discussing some opportunities in the Middle East.

One would be rather surprised to look at their client list. How did they do it? The answer is pretty basic. "Generating contacts, leads and queries for us is a very dear task, since it helps us interact with people from all over the world. While most of the generation is done through sales calls, cold calling etc. we have also seen a rise in queries being generated from online mediums like B2B portals, PPC channels and organic search listings," says Tilak. The normal gestation period of a customer is at least a month because of the kind of investments that each product requires and a lot of patience as well.

"We are highly people centric because we believe that it is the people of a company who drive it to success rather than the profits, turnover etc," says Shreyansh. The market scenario is a bit slow owing to the political conditions but the team expects it to pick up once a new government comes in. Durha is working with the magical figure of 100 crore INR in turnover by the end of financial year 2015-16 on their growth chart. Durha is currently funded by the group and also by the projects they have but might start to look out for funding to fuel further growth. The company will be concentrating heavily on developing technologies which revolutionize housing for the Below Poverty Line segments as well as leading the slum rehabilitation movement by providing solutions which turn out to be free of cost in the long term.