Hilti India Hosts Seismic Academy 2025 in New Delhi

03 Nov 2025 CW Team

Hilti India hosted the Seismic Academy Annual Conference 2025 at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, under the theme “Building Retrofits – Breathing Life into Existing Structures.” The event brought together engineers, policymakers, academicians, and industry leaders to address India’s ageing infrastructure and strengthen its earthquake resilience roadmap.

Since its inception in 2019, the Seismic Academy has engaged over 2,500 stakeholders through workshops, training, and research, influencing seismic code updates and advancing retrofit practices. The 2025 edition featured keynote sessions, technical talks, case studies, student competitions, and an expert panel discussion involving leaders from CPWD, IIT Delhi, AECOM, and CCEPL.

“Our commitment through the Seismic Academy has always been to make seismic safety not just a technical conversation, but a national priority,” said Jayant Kumar, General Manager and Managing Director, Hilti India. “Innovation must go beyond new construction to address vulnerabilities in existing infrastructure.”

Speakers including Dr. Shailesh Agrawal, Executive Director, BMTPC, and Prof. Vasant Matsagar of IIT Delhi, underscored the need for retrofitting, capacity building, and performance-based design to build resilient communities. Advisory board members Alok Bhowmick and Vinay Gupta highlighted policy alignment, engineering competency, and the scaling of proven retrofit technologies.

Hilti’s Seismic Academy continues to serve as a platform for research, collaboration, and policy dialogue, fostering innovation and preparedness to build a safer and more resilient India.

Real Estate

05 Dec 2025

RBI Rate Cut Boosts Confidence Across Housing Market

Industry Context and Market DynamicsThe real estate industry has welcomed the RBI’s rate cut as a timely boost to affordability and demand. With home prices having risen steadily across major markets, even a marginal reduction in interest rates meaningfully strengthens purchasing power, especially for first-time and mid-income buyers.Ashish Jerath, President – Sales & Marketing, Smartworld Developers, observes:“The RBI’s 25-basis-point cut, bringing the repo rate down to 5.25%, is a timely boost for the real estate sector. Lower interest rates reduce borrowing costs, enabling homeb..

BMC Resumes Rs 170 Billion Road Works, Targets 80 per cent By Jan 2026

Following the withdrawal of the southwest monsoon in October, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has restarted work on 645 roads—covering 297.49 kilometres—under its large-scale concretisation programme. Data shows that more than 60 per cent of the resumed works are located in the western suburbs. Officials said the civic body aims to complete concretisation on 80 per cent of the roads where fresh work has begun by January 2026. Launched in 2022, the Rs 170 billion project seeks to concretise 700 kilometres of roads across Mumbai. All civil works were halted during the monsoon ..

India Pushes Digital Shift In Urban Land Mapping

The Department of Land Resources (DoLR) under the Ministry of Rural Development has convened a National Symposium on NAKSHA – the National Geospatial Knowledge-based Land Survey of Urban Habitations – to advance India’s transition to modern, technology-driven land mapping. Speaking at the inaugural session, Secretary Manoj Joshi underscored the urgent need to move revenue departments away from outdated, tape-based methods and rough hand-drawn sketches. He stressed that adopting latitude–longitude-based digital mapping and GIS-linked registration systems is essential for economic stabi..