OFC Route Survey in Delhi NCR

Updated: 23 October 2026

What is an OFC route survey in Delhi NCR?

An OFC route survey in Delhi NCR is a check of the ground along a planned fibre alignment, done before any trench is opened or any HDD bore is drilled. The aim is plain: find out what already lies under the footpath, the service lane or the road shoulder, so the new duct goes where it will not hit, or sit on top of, someone else's asset.

On a typical NCR corridor the team uses ground penetrating radar (GPR) for metallic and non-metallic services alike, and an electromagnetic (EM) cable locator for live metallic utilities such as power cables. Each find is marked on the ground and logged with its position and estimated depth. The designer then knows three things: where the duct can go, where it must shift sideways or deeper, and where a trial pit is wise before anyone digs.

The method itself is described on our OFC route GPR survey service page.

Why do NCR fibre routes need scanning before ducting?

The region's ground is crowded. A single Delhi footpath can hold power distribution cables of BSES Rajdhani, BSES Yamuna or Tata Power-DDL, Delhi Jal Board water lines, sewers, city gas pipes and the ducts of several telecom operators, each laid at a different time by a different contractor. Across the state borders the owners change – DHBVN and the Gurugram or Faridabad municipal corporations in Haryana, the Noida and Greater Noida authorities in Uttar Pradesh – yet the layering looks much the same.

Some features of NCR make blind digging especially costly:

• Metro and Namo Bharat corridors. Viaduct piers and station entries leave little room on the roads below them, and nearby utilities have often been diverted from their original lines.
• Expressways and national highways. Routes beside NH-48, the Dwarka Expressway or the Noida–Greater Noida Expressway meet service roads, drains and culverts at short intervals.
• Repeated road widening. When a carriageway grows, services that once sat under the verge can end up beneath new lanes, far from where old drawings put them.
• Big drains and Yamuna crossings. Large storm drains and river crossings usually force a change of method, often to HDD.

A strike on an HT cable or a water main halts the work, brings a repair bill and strains relations with the road owner. Locating services first costs far less than any of those outcomes.

Which survey types can an operator choose from?

Few routes need every method on every metre. The usual building blocks are these:

Records check and walkover

Before radar touches the ground, the team walks the alignment and notes chambers, poles, marker stones, valve covers and old road cuts, then compares them with whatever drawings the operator holds.

2D GPR line survey

The workhorse of route work. Radar lines run along the alignment, with cross-lines at intervals and at each visible clue, picking up pipes, cables and ducts, plastic ones included.

3D or high-resolution grid

Kept for congested junctions, substation frontages and metro station areas, where lines cross one another and a single pass cannot separate them; a higher antenna frequency is often used here for finer detail near the surface.

EM locating

For live power cables and metallic pipes, EM utility locating traces the line and helps confirm what the radar has shown.

L-section survey

Adds a depth profile of the detected services along the route, for work orders that call for one.

Crossing survey

A focused scan of the HDD bore path and the entry and exit pits at road, drain and rail crossings. Our HDD route survey guide for Delhi NCR goes into this further.

Trial pits and boreholes

Where radar cannot see deep enough or a find is unclear, a hand-dug pit settles it. We take these up on request.

Which terms in a survey specification should operators understand?

Specifications written by operators and their EPC contractors lean on a handful of terms. Agree on them before work starts:

When a tender names a particular quality level or output format, quote that wording in your enquiry so scope and price line up with it.

What should a good NCR route survey deliver?

Whatever an operator calls it internally, a survey worth paying for shows a few clear features:

• every detected service with its position, estimated depth and the method that found it;
• honest coverage, with no-access stretches and depth limits marked instead of left blank;
• ground marks that match the record, so site staff and the designer work from one picture;
• crossings described on their own, with notes on what lies under the planned bore path;
• a signed report that a reviewer at the operator can check against the route plan.

Drawings in CAD or GIS format can be prepared when an operator wants them, but they are quoted separately from the per-metre survey rate. How operators use this information across a network is covered on our page for telecom operators.

How should an operator plan the survey along an NCR route?

1. Fix the alignment. Share a KML file or route drawing with total length, side of road and planned crossings.
2. List who owns each stretch. A route from Dwarka towards Gurugram, or from Noida into East Delhi, passes through land held by different agencies. Check with each road-owning agency what it needs before survey and trenching. Traffic arrangements and permissions sit outside the survey rate and are charged separately.
3. Pick methods stretch by stretch. Plain 2D lines on open service roads, tighter grids at junctions, crossing scans at drains and rail lines.
4. Plan working hours. Busy commercial roads may be workable only at night, and night-shift working is a separate item.
5. Group the work. Several short routes in one order reach the 4 km minimum, and the discount slabs, sooner.
6. Settle the output early. Decide whether marks and a report are enough or whether a drawing set is also needed.

City-level detail sits on our pages for Delhi, Gurugram, Noida and Faridabad.

How is an OFC route survey in NCR priced?

Cost follows length, not days on site. The standard GPR route survey is ₹24 for every metre, which comes to ₹24,000 a kilometre. If the work order wants a depth profile, the L-section survey is ₹32 a metre. GST is added on top of either.

• Orders below 4 km are billed as 4 km.
• Within Delhi NCR there is no project-value minimum; the ₹1,00,000 floor applies only to projects outside the region.
• Large orders earn a discount on every metre: a quarter off once the order is longer than 100 km, 40% off above 500 km, and half off above 1,000 km.
• Moving crews to site (mobilisation), night shifts, traffic arrangements or permissions, and any CAD/GIS drawing set each appear as a separate line.

A 12 km standard route survey, as an example, comes to ₹2,88,000 before GST. The full rate card and a calculator are on the GPR survey price list.

How should route records be kept after the cable is laid?

A survey only pays off if people can find it later. Operators with good route records tend to follow a few habits:

• Keep survey and as-laid apart. The survey shows what was in the ground before; the as-laid record shows where your duct actually went. You need both.
• File the KML with the report. One folder per route, named by the operator's route ID, holding the alignment file, the signed report and any drawings.
• Log site changes. If the duct moved on site to dodge a find, record the new offset and depth instead of leaving the design line in the file.
• Share with the road owner when asked. Many agencies want to know what lies under their roads, and a clean record makes later cuts by others less likely to damage your fibre.
• Scan again before major work. NCR roads change quickly. Before adding ducts or relaying a stretch years later, re-survey instead of trusting an old file.

Since the crews and all 58 company-owned GPR systems work out of Sector 41, Faridabad, NCR routes are close to home; the start date for each job is agreed when the order is placed.