The well-known Indian ‘Stellar Group’, which has been successfully working in the construction business for over 25 years, is convinced that precast is the future of the building industry in India. To stay ahead, they have expanded their portfolio with a hollow core production area from UltraSpan, a company of the Progress Group, in close cooperation with their Indian subsidiary Progress Precast India. Even dealing with special circumstances during the Covid outbreak, the companies managed to deliver and install as well as instruct Stellar on the new machinery, which is now benefitting the construction leader in many ways.
With the focus being on commercial and residential buildings, Stellar has developed over 9 mio. sq. ft. of residential and commercial projects. The major current projects include a residential project of over 16 acres and three commercial projects of close to 1.5 Mio sq. ft. - all of which are benefitting from the usage of precast concrete elements. The main scope of delivery is being located in the NCR - National Capital Region.
“Building in general is becoming troublesome as the shortage of skilled manpower is huge and we feel this problem will increase in the future. So we are of the opinion that precast and the factory based production of it is the only way to reduce the requirement of manpower. With the additional benefit of better quality, time saving and better worker safety, we believe that precast is the best option going forward,” says Akshay Sethi, Director, Stellar Group.
In the beginning, Stellar had some similar commercial building projects, which were lined up in the last few years. So moving the focus to constructing with standardized precast made more sense - especially in commercial buildings, as you get a longer span and a clear room / working area. Apart from that, precast has the benefit of reducing the construction time up to 50%, so the elements can be produced under any weather condition in the plant and the machinery can work round the clock.
In addition, the quality of the product is consistently good as it is produced in a highly automated plant. The elements stay in a certain quality that is not achievable with traditional construction methods. There are too many factors that can compromize the quality and quite often the speed of construction causes mistakes that need to be mended. Also, safety remains a big concern. It is also way easier to guarantee with producing and building with precast elements.
| Project overview 2021 / 2022 | ||
| Project name | Size | Status |
| Stellar IT park | 9 lakhs sqft | Completed |
| Stellar business park | 9 lakhs sqft | Completed |
| Stellar 135 | 3.6 lakhs sqft | Completed |
| Stellar 1425 | 4.5 lakhs sqft | Completed |
| Stellar 127 | 2.8 lakhs sqft | Completed |
| Stellar 1423 | 3.3 lakhs sqft | In progress |
| Stellar 1422 | 9.7 lakhs sqft | Upcoming |
In 2021, the newest precast machinery was installed in the Stellar plant. With the Ultra Span Extruder and a concrete sawing machine, the hollow core slabs for the projects can be produced fast and with standardized quality. Presently, two different slab thicknesses are being produced at the plant: 250 mm and 320 mm with the ability to change the size from 100mm to 400mm with easily changeable cassette.
Such hollow core slab sizes can cover a wide range of construction projects, satisfying a wide variety of structural requirements in today’s demanding projects. The current production capacity is based on four - 145 meter long casting lines. With these newly installed casting beds and the recently delivered hydraulically powered tilting tables from Progress Precast India, the daily output could be increased and product delivered to new projects on time and with impeccable quality.
“What we have seen is that the hollow core machinery of UltraSpan / Progress Precast India brings a lot of efficiency compared to other hollow core production machinery. We saw that the void percentage is much higher and safety is also higher. The machine is simpler to understand and handle and can be maintained very easily. If any problem comes up, it can be resolved very quickly, so the downtime is less. We are very satisfied with it,” says Project Manager Gaurav.
With 25 years experience the construction company never fails to think ahead and invest in innovation – such as precast.There were some hiccups due to Covid and Progress had to commission the hollow core machinery remotely because of the restrictions. Nevertheless, Stellar could start the production and move on with their projects with the service provided by Progress, although remotely as advised. The local office of the machinery producer could additionally organize a partnering engineering company to support Stellar. So, even in this difficult times there was a solution provided by the local office in India belonging to the Progress Group.
What are Stellar’s future plans?
“We are now targetting construction of commercial projects and industries. We are getting a lot of enquiries from vendors who need precast solutions for their projects,” informs the Project Manager.
The warehouse space has gone up where the market is preferring to build with precast, seeing its convincing benefits. Also, the cost of steel is increasing significantly, so the trend is moving from traditional buildings to precast buildings, especially in the commercial sector.
“We are planning to expand our precast factories also for residential developments,” says Gaurav, who is envisaging an exciting future with precast construction leading the way in all the building segments of India.
