Delivering on time when the stakes were high
January 13th, 2023. For Project Manager, K N Sabarish, and his team at the Birsa Munda International Hockey Stadium project, that date must have been recurring in their dreams. It was the date for the opening match of the International Hockey Federation (FIH) World Cup Hockey tournament scheduled to be held in Odisha, India, and their stadium had to ready before that date. The world was their stage; the stakes were very high. The great news is that the team delivered and met all their delivery dates.
While our scope of work kept increasing substantially, our deadline remained set in stone. Meticulous planning, the execution of steel works, façade works and excellent customer relationships were the ingredients to our success apart from unstinted support from my entire senior leadership starting from SNS Sir, MVS Sir, SDS Sir and others and the never-say-die attitude of my entire site team. It is truly a victory of teamwork.
K N Sabarish
Project Manager
The stadium was inaugurated by the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Odisha, Shri Naveen Patnaik on January 5th, 2023. The first match on the turf between India and Spain was held as scheduled on January 14th, 2023. The stadium has entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest seated hockey stadium with a total seating capacity of 20,011. And, to top it all, they won L&T Construction’s Timely Delivery Award 2023.
“It took us 15 months from scratch to deliver the stadium, built to speed and scale,” remarks Sabarish, “but those were the toughest 15 months of my professional career,” he adds with a rueful smile. The challenges were aplenty: a shift of the playing arena from the original location cost the team three months of execution time; the shift impacted the soil-bearing capacity that called for re-designing; it also meant increased quantities of concrete, reinforcement, shuttering, and structural steel. For instance, their quantity of concrete jumped from 6,500 cum to 40,000 cum. And, the project scope increased from Rs. 114 Crores to Rs. 285 Crores.
That they yet delivered is because the team got their choice and adoption of technology, materials and machines spot on, apart from coordinating the entire spectrum of project management, across the areas of planning, mobilization, procurement, workforce management, EHS, Quality, subcontract management, and more. The team fabricated 4,000 MT of structural steel, including 51,000 elements and over 1.20 lakh bolts at a specialized structural steel vendor’s factory at Bhilai, and transported these to Rourkela in phases for erection to progress, congruent with the sequence. The structural steel elements were digitally tracked for seamless erection, using heavy cranes varying from 80 to 150 tonnes, boom lifts with varying jibs of 80 ft to 150 ft.
Lending a foreign touch to a truly international stadium are the Astroturf pitches from Germany and the sauna system from Spain. To retain the local flavour, 1500 migrant workers from across the country were involved in building this state-of-the-art arena.
“While our scope of work kept increasing substantially, our deadline remained set in stone,” says Sabarish. “Meticulous planning, the execution of steel works, façade works and excellent customer relationships were the ingredients to our success apart from unstinted support from my entire senior leadership starting from SNS Sir, MVS Sir, SDS Sir and others and the never-say-die attitude of my entire site team. It is truly a victory of teamwork.”
For a more in-depth look at the Birsa Munda Project, read our recent coverage in the April–September 2023 issue of ECC Concord.