Mr. Atul Bhobe is a highly respected structural engineering expert and industry leader, known for his deep expertise in structural health monitoring, bridge engineering, and infrastructure diagnostics, with decades of consulting experience on complex projects.

He has played a pivotal role in advancing practical SHM applications in India, combining engineering judgment with real-world implementation, and is widely regarded for shaping how monitoring is actually deployed and used in critical infrastructure.

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Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is not uniformly mandated across infrastructure projects today but it is no longer optional in any practical sense. Somewhere between evolving guidelines, agency expectations, and increasing project risk, monitoring has entered a grey zone where it may not always be explicitly required, yet is becoming increasingly difficult to justify excluding.

This is exactly where the industry stands today not pressured into adoption, but regulated into it.

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If you look for a clear directive mandating SHM across all infrastructure projects, you won’t find one. That absence often leads to a dangerous assumption that monitoring is optional.

In reality, the situation is far more nuanced. Codes may not prescribe continuous monitoring systems in a strict sense, but they consistently point toward:

• Instrumentation
• Validation
• Performance tracking

Which, in practice, are impossible to execute meaningfully without structured monitoring.

As Atul Bhobe puts it:

“You won’t always find monitoring explicitly mandated but in many cases, it’s expected.”

This gap between what is written and what is required in practice is where most projects operate and where the need for reliable SHM systems emerges.

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Frameworks from the Indian Roads Congress (IRC) emphasize load testing, construction-stage instrumentation, and validation, all of which implicitly depend on monitoring, but stop short of defining how monitoring should be implemented, sustained, or used over the lifecycle of the structure.

This creates a critical gap. Monitoring becomes a derived necessity, but not a designed system. And when something is necessary but not well-defined, it is often:

• Underutilized
• Underspecified
• Under-engineered

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The strongest signals are not coming from regulations alone, but from execution environments, especially in projects involving agencies like the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), railways, and metro authorities.

Here, monitoring is increasingly appearing in:

• Consultant recommendations
• Tender documents
• Design briefs

“In many projects involving major agencies, monitoring is being specified more frequently, especially during construction or load testing.”

But this inclusion is still inconsistent, which means implementation quality varies widely from meaningful systems to basic instrumentation.

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Project context	Level of necessity	How monitoring is treated	Primary purpose	Typical implementation
High-risk / High-value structures (e.g., long-span bridges, complex infrastructure systems)	Expected (quasi-mandatory)	Included in tenders and actively reviewed during execution	Reduce uncertainty and manage critical structural risk	Integrated into project scope with higher attention to deployment and outputs
Complex construction scenarios (e.g., tunneling near existing structures, rehabilitation projects)	Functionally indispensable (implicitly required)	Not always mandated, but necessary for engineering validation	Ensure safety, enable real-time decision-making, manage construction risk	Deployed for real-time or near-real-time monitoring during critical phases
Routine infrastructure (e.g., standard flyovers, short-span bridges)	Optional / minimal	Often reduced or excluded; if included, treated as a formality	Satisfy testing or compliance requirements	Temporary instrumentation, limited scope, rarely used for long-term insights

The pattern is clear:
The higher the risk, the less optional monitoring becomes, regardless of regulation.

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The push toward monitoring is not being driven by regulation alone, but by:

• Increasing structural complexity
• Dense urban construction environments
• Higher accountability and scrutiny

In such conditions, relying on manual inspection, temporary instrumentation and fragmented data is no longer sufficient.

Monitoring is no longer about whether it is required.
It is about whether it is reliable, continuous, and decision-ready.

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SHM is transitioning from:

• A temporary setup → to a continuous intelligence system
• A compliance activity → to a risk management system
• A project add-on → to a core engineering layer

But this transition demands a different kind of approach, one that is:

• Designed for long-term deployment
• Capable of delivering actionable insights, not just raw data
• Integrated into decision-making workflows, not isolated from them

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The industry keeps asking:
“Is SHM mandatory?”

But that is no longer the right question.

The real question is:
When monitoring becomes unavoidable in practice, why are we still implementing it like it’s optional?

Because the shift is already underway.
And the difference going forward will not be whether monitoring is used but how well it is implemented, and whether it actually informs decisions.

© 2026 Nirixense Technologies Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. email: connect@nirixense.com

About this series: Field Notes in Structural Intelligence is a thought leadership series by Nirixense Technologies, where we engage with experts across structural engineering and monitoring to understand how SHM actually works in practice and where it needs to evolve next.