Termite Treatment.
The soil under the country's landmarks is treated with protection against termites before construction begins. Under most homes, the same step is invisible, and only a document will ever say whether it happened.
By M. Arun Kumar, Managing Director, Envu India
Think of the landmarks a country decides to take seriously. A statue seen for miles. A foreign consulate. An international convention centre. A retail hall that holds thousands at once. Different in every visible way, and alike in one that is never visible at all.
Before the foundation of each was poured, someone treated the soil beneath it against termites. It is a quiet, standard step on serious projects, and nobody who commissions such a building would think of skipping it.
Then consider the home you are about to move into. The same ground, the same insects, the same standard written for both. The difference is that at the statue somebody made sure. At the flat, nobody will tell you either way unless you know to ask. [1]
You have seen the reason without recognising it. Two or three evenings after the first heavy rain, winged insects circle the lights, and by morning there are shed wings on the floor. Somebody sweeps up, and nobody thinks about it again. Those winged insects are reproductives, leaving a mature colony to start new ones. Whether any couple (male and female termite) get into the building they circle was decided years earlier, before it existed.
The work that happens before the first brick
Picture the site at the very beginning. The trenches are open, the steel is not yet tied, the ground is bare. Somebody walks those trenches with a pressure sprayer and lays a chemical barrier into the soil: the bottoms and sides of the trench, the earth packed back against the foundation, the line where the wall will meet the floor, the ground around every pipe.
Then the concrete goes in, and the chemical applied soil barrier disappears under the building for good.
The obvious question is why it cannot be dealt with later, if and when termites appear. It can. But once the building stands, reaching that same soil means drilling through finished floors and walls to inject beneath them: the same protection, bought the hard way, in a home someone already lives in. Doing it first, into open ground, is the cheaper and cleaner path, and the only one anyone can watch being done.
Years later, the soil can still be sampled and tested, but a reading taken then tells you only what is in the ground today, not what went in, at what strength, over how much area, before the slab was poured. Which is why, for this one item, the record made at that time is the evidence, and the law leans on it: a buyer has five years from possession to raise a defect in structure, workmanship or quality, and this is the rare defect that stays hidden for most of them. [2]
The difference worth understanding
The Indian Standard covering this work is precise about quantity. Five litres of solution for every square metre along the trench bottoms and the top of the plinth fill, seven and a half litres where the wall meets the floor and along the outside of the building, two litres per running metre of expansion joint, and separate attention to the soil around every pipe and conduit that enters the ground. For a mid-sized masonry building on a thousand-square-metre footprint, its own worked example runs to 9,360 litres going into the ground and never seen again. [1]
Quantity is the easy part. The choice that decides how well the barrier works is which chemical goes into it, and here I will give you my own view.
The Standard enlists three approved chemicals and, in an informative annex, sets out how they differ: dilution, odour, and whether they work by repelling termites or by other means. Two of the three are recorded as repellent, one as non-repellent. It offers this as a preliminary guide and asks users to make an informed choice for the project, based on its location, size, soil type and the kind of building going up. [1]
What follows is my own view rather than the Standard's. Picture a termite reaching the treated soil. A repellent chemistry turns it away: the insect senses the barrier, retreats, and searches along the foundation for a way past, and if the application left the smallest gap, it will find it. A non-repellent chemistry works differently. The termite does not detect the treated zone, enters it, and is affected there. To my mind, that is the more forgiving of the two, because it does not depend on the barrier being flawless along every metre of a foundation laid over several weeks by different crews.
That is the distinction I would want any buyer or specifier to understand before comparing two quotes that look identical on paper. Written properly, a specification names the chemical and the strength it is mixed to, the quantity for each surface, and the construction stage for each application. It can then be priced honestly and checked while the trench is still open.
Does the buyer need to follow any of this?
No. Imagine a family taking possession of a flat. They check the flooring, run the taps, open every window, photograph anything chipped. All of it visible, all of it worth doing.
The one thing they cannot see is the ground beneath them. It is a little like the emergency number nobody memorises until the day they need it: the information is simple, and the moment to have it is long before the crisis.
For this, there is a document. A treatment certificate is issued at the end of the work, and a thorough one records the chemical and its concentration, the areas treated, the dates against each construction stage, and the agency that did it, with its licence under the Insecticides Act. Asking for it at possession, and keeping it with the papers of the flat, is all a buyer needs to do. A decade on, when the soil can no longer tell you what went into it, that certificate is the only proof the treatment ever happened. [1]
Who wrote these rules?
It is worth knowing who produced the Standard. CREDAI sat on the committee. So did the Central Public Works Department, CSIR's Central Building Research Institute, the Central Insecticides Board and the Indian Institute of Architects, alongside the pest management industry. Developers, engineers, architects, and pest control professionals worked these numbers out among themselves. [1]
So, the technical work has been carefully done by the sector itself. What is left is ordinary. Carry it into the specification. Keep the paper at the end. The reproductives will fly next monsoon again, as they always have. Whether that matters to the family checking their flooring was settled in a single line, years before they saw the building, in the same soil treated so carefully under the landmark down the road.
About M. Arun Kumar:
He is the Managing Director of Envu India, a standalone environmental science company and a global leader in professional pest management and mosquito management. Over a career spanning nearly three decades across pharmaceuticals and environmental science, Arun has built and led businesses across both industries and today runs Envu's India operations, which span vector control, real estate, hospitality, plywood, poultry and residential segments. At its core, he argues, this is public health work. Controlling the mosquitoes, pests and contamination that reach people in their homes, hospitals and food is a health function that has long been misfiled as agriculture, and the products used to do it must clear a stricter safety and efficacy bar than farm chemicals. He is candid that the Indian market still buys pest management largely on cost, and that the industry will only mature when customers begin demanding trained people, documented protocols and accountability rather than the lowest quote. Acting on that view, Envu India established a Skill India-certified re-skilling programme for pest-control technicians in partnership with the National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, creating a formal certification pathway for a workforce.
