Underground Utility Mapping and Strike Prevention

Rates and page checked: 23 October 2026

What should be scanned in the days before excavation starts?

Design-stage mapping and the last check before a machine moves are two different jobs. The first shapes the route; the second confirms that the ground at each pit, trench length and bore entry still matches what the route was designed around. Between those two dates, services get added, diverted and repaired, sometimes by gangs who told nobody.

A sensible pre-dig check concentrates on:

• Pit and launch positions – HDD entry and exit pits, jointing bays and chamber locations, where the bucket goes deepest.
• The trench line itself, scanned along its length with cross-lines wherever a service is expected to cut across.
• Frontages and junctions, because plot take-offs and converging services gather there.
• Anything the earlier survey flagged as low confidence, so it can be rescanned or proved by a trial pit.

Each find is sprayed onto the surface in its service colour, depth noted alongside, ideally only a few days ahead of the excavating gang so they are still legible when the work reaches them. Our pre-excavation utility scanning service is built around this short-notice, footprint-focused check, and the comparison of radar with trial pits and boreholes explains when a hole is worth digging to confirm a reading.

How does a survey turn into a map that people actually use?

A strike is avoided only when information reaches the right person in a form they can act on. In practice that means three kinds of output, each with a different reader:

1. Ground marks for the operator and the banksman, who will never open a drawing on site.
2. A signed survey report for the site engineer – plan position and approximate depth of each detected service, the method that found it, how deep the radar reached on each section and which stretches could not be scanned at all.
3. CAD or GIS drawings for the designer and the asset owner, when the project needs a record that outlives the job. These are prepared on request and quoted apart from the survey.

Where depth is needed along the whole alignment rather than at spot points, an L-section survey adds a depth profile of the detected services along the route. Our utility mapping service describes how findings are assembled into a working map, and the note on what a GPR survey hands over lays the report and drawing options side by side.

What does a strike-prevention survey cost?

Far less than the repair bill, the lost days and the difficult meeting with the asset owner that a single strike brings. Our survey is charged by length:

• ₹24 per metre for a standard GPR route survey, which works out to ₹24,000 a kilometre.
• ₹32 per metre when the L-section depth profile is added.
• 4 km is the shortest order billed, in Delhi NCR and everywhere else; beyond NCR each project also carries a ₹1,00,000 floor.
• Volume pricing on the whole order – 25% off once it passes 100 km, 40% past 500 km and 50% past 1,000 km, applied to every metre.

Mobilisation, night-shift working, traffic arrangements and permissions, and CAD/GIS drawing sets are not part of the metre rate; the quote lists each one separately. GST is added on top. All 58 radar systems we deploy are company-owned and run by in-house crews, so no hire charge is hidden in the price. The full slab table and worked examples are on the GPR survey price list.