William Swan, of Swan Golf Design, talks about the idiosyncrasies of working on golf courses in India.
As he explains, even the most straightforward tasks are undertaken in a way that is alien to other parts of the world
Indian Summary!
S
wan Golf Design (SGD) has a long history of working with golf clubs in the UK, Ireland and continental
Europe, helping to bring their courses into the modern golfing era. Although each course is unique and demands an individual approach from us, there are always similarities between the projects. One of our greatest challenges is to maintain our focus on each course’s individuality, and not to fall into the trap of implementing “one size fits all” design solutions.
A major factor in our ability to
recognise and embrace the differences between the courses we work on has always been our experiences from projects all around the world. Whilst it may be difficult to formulate individual approaches to two courses that are only twenty miles apart, the differences between a renovation project in Surrey
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and a new build project in northern Brazil hit you right in the face! And it has been, particularly, our work in India over the past five years that has forced us to adopt the concept of a permanent revolution in our methods. Unexpectedly, our first project in India
was a renovation, not a new build. However, its scope was such that it encompassed all aspects of golf course design, with the exception of routing. Since we began this project in 2005 we have been involved in several projects that have added further to our experience in India, and these have taught us valuable lessons which we’ve been able to apply to renovation projects closer to home.
When we set out for India, we were
well prepared for the more obvious differences from the UK golf development industry we would
encounter. The climate was always going to be a driving factor in these differences, and we knew we’d be looking towards specifying warm-season grasses and a greater irrigations capacity than we would back home. As we carried out more research, we found that a high drainage capacity was necessary, because 90% of the annual rainfall is squashed into just three months. As we’ve been finding out, over the last few weeks, the UK isn’t geared for this amount of water arriving over a short period, but we’ve had to make sure that we weren’t under specifying the drainage system. The construction process itself is completely unrecognisable to the ones in Western Europe, predominantly because of India’s relationship between cost of labour and cost of machinery, which is skewed heavily towards labour.
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