After several weeks of discussions and design changes later, we finally signed the contract for building a pump house. The contractor started making his arrangements for material and work and gave us a date for the work to start. We made our usual 4 hour drive to the farm and reached there by 11 am or so. We had to do some puja etc for starting the work. Never made any sense to me, but the local workers are expecting it. More importantly, the contractor was a very god fearing person and had a lot of beliefs. Anyway, that out of the way, we had to dig a little bit to get the work started. So I did my bit of ploughing.



Then they started measuring for the pump house. Marked the foundation so a JCB can dig it.



A tractor with coarse aggregates was ready waiting to take the load up to the foundation, but there is a huge problem. It rained a bit at the farm the previous day and the soil was very soft and slippery. The tractor could not go up the slope of our land. The wheels would spin uncontrollably without any movement of the vehicle because of the slippery soil. So we waited for a JCB to come and push the tractor up through the muddy soil.


JCB helping tractor up the muddy farm


Still, the tractor could not make it all the way to the location of the pump house and dumped the material half way. That means more cost for the contractor to have manual labor pick up the coarse aggregates from the dump site to the construction area. The troubles with locals started from right there. The contractor argued with the tractor fellow about the work. But eventually things proceeded.


Tractor dumped coarse aggregates at the wrong location


Finally JCB started digging the foundation.


JCB digging foundation


By the time the foundation work was done it was afternoon. We had our lunch and drove back home. From here on, the contractor is expected to take over the monitoring of the work. We will be mostly hands off unless our input is required. We planned to watch the progress of work over our CCTV that we installed so we don’t have to travel frequently to the farm.