A homeowner at Arya Bhangy Rhinestone said this about us, some years after moving in, and it has stayed with us. It is the kind of line a builder would like to put in an advertisement. We would rather tell you what actually happened, because the story is more useful to a buyer than the line.
Seventy metres of mud
When we began Rhinestone in Panampilly Nagar, the stretch of road directly in front of the site, about seventy metres of it, was mud. Not a poor road, no road: an unmade strip that the shops and vendors nearby used to park their trucks and loading vehicles. In the monsoon it was a channel. In the dry months it was dust and parked lorries.
It was a public road. Which is to say, it belonged to everybody and therefore to nobody. We asked the Corporation to tar it. The Corporation said it was not theirs. We were sent to the Greater Cochin Development Authority, who sent us to the Port authority, who sent us back to the council. Every office we approached agreed that the road should be tarred and that it was someone else’s job to do it. This went on for a long time.
What we had promised
We had told every family who booked a flat at Rhinestone that they would have a properly made, well-maintained public road in front of their building. We had said it plainly, and they had bought on that basis. So the question of whose responsibility the road was had a simple answer as far as we were concerned: if nobody else would take it, it was ours.
Two years in court
We went to court. Not against anyone in particular, because there was nobody to sue, but for a declaration that would let us do the work ourselves. It took two years. The court appointed an advocate commissioner to inspect the road and report, and on that report it granted us what we had asked for: permission to tar a public road, at our own cost, with our own contractors.
As far as we know, that was the first verdict of its kind in Kochi: a private company given the court’s leave to build a public road that the public authorities had declined to build. We laid the road. The families moved in on it. It is still there.
Why we tell this story
Not because it makes us look good, although we are proud of it. We tell it because it shows what we think the job includes.
A building does not stop at its boundary wall. The road that reaches it, the drain that carries its water away, the connections that make it a place to live rather than a structure to look at: these are part of what a buyer is paying for, whether or not they appear on the plan. When something outside the wall is wrong, and nobody else will fix it, fixing it is part of the project. It comes before the sales launch, not after the complaints.
That principle has a cost. Two years of legal work and the price of a road is not a small sum for seventy metres. It is why our projects sometimes take longer to bring to market than others. We would rather explain the cost than have a buyer discover the alternative.
Why access roads matter more in Kochi than buyers expect
Most of Kochi’s residential land was never laid out as a city. It was fields, backwater edge and house plots, joined by lanes that served a few families. When a plot becomes an apartment building, the lane that reached it is suddenly expected to carry fifty households, their cars, their deliveries and a fire engine. Very often it cannot, and very often nobody is responsible for making it able to.
This is one of the most common regrets we hear from people who bought elsewhere. The flat is fine. Getting to it, every day, is not. And it is close to impossible to fix afterwards, because the builder has moved on and the owners’ association has neither the money nor the standing to fight the Corporation for two years.
What to check before you buy, anywhere
Drive the last kilometre to any project you are considering, at eight in the morning and again at six in the evening, in the rain if you can manage it. Note the width of the road at its narrowest point. Ask the builder who owns it. Ask whether it floods. Ask what happens when two cars meet.
Then ask whether the builder has done anything about it, and what. The answer will tell you more about how they think than anything in the brochure.
The homeowner’s full testimonial is [here]. [Link to the Mohana Kumaran testimonial.]