28 years, and still on site every week

3s Vastu Construction brings together two things that are usually kept apart in Odisha — traditional Vastu consultancy and practical construction engineering. The firm's view is simple: advice that cannot be built is of no use to a family, and a building put up without thought for direction, light and air is a house nobody is comfortable in.

Saroj Kumar Panda has spent 28 years in construction. That work has spanned multi-storey buildings, highways, bridges, railway over bridges, flyovers, underpasses and irrigation structures — the kind of projects where tolerances are tight and mistakes are expensive. He has received 32 awards and honours over the course of that career.

Alongside the engineering, he practises as a Vastu consultant, and has advised more than ten thousand clients. He also speaks on spiritual and motivational subjects.

How the firm works

Most cost disputes on private houses come from the same three causes: a vague estimate at the start, verbal changes nobody recorded, and material that reached the site but never reached the building. So every site is run on a written daily record.

• Labour attendance recorded every day, with wages calculated from it
• Every delivery entered against the supplier's challan, with a photograph
• Machinery hours and diesel metered per machine
• Stage-wise billing, so the client always knows where the money stands
• Extra work agreed and signed before it is carried out — never after

At handover the account reconciles, because it reconciled every day along the way.

Our aim: a simple, innovative, economical architectural design and Vastu consultancy service — available to an ordinary family, not only to those building something grand.