Delhi is rarely a first-lab market
Most Indian cities commissioning a cath lab are commissioning their first. Delhi almost never is. The city holds the densest concentration of interventional cardiology in the country — central institutes, state super-speciality hospitals, the large private groups, and a long tail of 100 to 300 bed hospitals adding a second lab or replacing an ageing system. On top of resident demand sits sustained inbound referral from western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Bihar, plus a genuine international patient flow.
Two things follow. Specification expectations start high: a referral centre competing for complex PCI, structural heart, electrophysiology and neurointervention work is asking whether the shell will take a biplane gantry now or convert to hybrid in five years. And the project is usually an addition to a live programme, so the new lab must be built without interrupting the old one, inside the hospital’s existing OEM relationship, technical room and electrical backbone. Where single-plane is still the honest answer on documented case mix, we say so.
Structure, height and ingress decide the room
Delhi has almost no spare floor plate, so the question is which existing room can be converted. Three tests settle it, and all three belong to the survey.
Floor loading. Gantry, monitor suspension, lead acrylic screen and pendants hang from a load-bearing steel grid anchored to the structural slab and designed to the OEM’s point loads, never from a false ceiling. In blocks built through the 1970s and 1980s the as-built reinforcement drawings often do not exist, which means physical survey, cover meter work and occasionally non-destructive testing before anyone commits.
Slab-to-slab height. A ceiling-mounted gantry wants at least 3.4 to 3.6 m slab to slab, leaving a finished ceiling near 2.9 to 3.0 m under the rails. Delhi’s older blocks frequently sit at 3.0 to 3.3 m, and below about 3.2 m the location usually fails — a floor-mounted configuration is the fallback, not a redesign of the ceiling void.
Ingress. Service lifts, corridor turning circles and door openings in existing blocks were sized for stretchers, not for crated gantries and generator cabinets. On constrained sites the answer is a temporary façade opening and a crane lift — a programme and structural item, not a logistics detail. Cable routing is the corollary: runs between technical room and gantry need a floor trench or underslab conduit, and where the slab cannot be cut the fallback is a raised floor with a compliant ramp, reconciled against the OEM’s flatness tolerance.
Adjoining occupancy is what makes Delhi shielding expensive
Lead equivalence is calculated barrier by barrier from workload, operating kVp, distance, the occupancy factor of the space beyond and the shielding design goal for it. In a dense Delhi building, more of those spaces classify as fully occupied uncontrolled areas at short distance. A lab flanked by a ward, a waiting area and occupied floors above and below gets a different answer from one surrounded by corridors and plant rooms. Barriers that land at 1.5-2 mm Pb in a generous layout move to 2.5-3 mm, and floor and ceiling shielding becomes mandatory rather than a question.
Sequencing matters more than the numbers. The shielding layout must be produced and submitted before civil work starts — retrofitting lead into finished walls is the most avoidable overrun in cath lab work. Three execution faults account for most survey failures: butt joints without a 10-12 mm lead overlap, uncapped fixings, and unbaffled penetrations.
The AERB pathway, and the Delhi approvals beside it
AERB regulates the lab as a radiation installation, through eLORA. Structurally: institution registration; layout approval on the shielding drawing, before construction; a type-approved system from a recognised supplier; an approved Radiological Safety Officer; OEM installation and acceptance testing; QA testing and a radiation survey at every barrier; then licence application. The licence to operate is issued to the hospital, not the contractor. We prepare the submission package and coordinate QA and survey, and flag what sits with you — RSO certification above all, since it runs on fixed examination cycles. We cannot guarantee approval. AERB procedures are revised periodically, so treat current eLORA guidance as authoritative and budget three to six months of regulatory lead time in parallel with construction.
Running alongside: Delhi Fire Service NOC, DPCC consent where plant or DG capacity changes, registration under the Delhi Nursing Homes Registration Act, and DDA or MCD building sanction if built-up area, floor count or use changes. That last one is the long pole.
Rooms, power and air
A workable single-plane procedure room is 40-55 sq m; biplane needs 55-70 sq m. Add a 12-20 sq m control room with direct sightline through a 2 mm Pb lead glass window, and a 12-20 sq m technical room — the space Delhi retrofits most often under-size. It rejects 5-15 kW continuously, case or no case, against an OEM ambient band commonly 18-25°C with a hard throttle limit.
Cine runs pull momentary demand in the order of 100-150 kVA against a modest average, so the design point is a dedicated feeder — often a dedicated transformer — with cable impedance low enough to hold voltage regulation during the run. Add a low-impedance earth, equipotential bonding consistent with what IEC 60601 assumes for Group 2 medical locations, isolated power with a line isolation monitor in the patient vicinity, an online UPS of roughly 20-60 kVA with 20-30 minutes autonomy, and DG capacity that accepts the step load cleanly.
Air handling has a Delhi edge. The procedure room needs 21-24°C, 40-60% RH, positive pressure and 15-20 air changes per hour of HEPA-filtered supply. NCR particulate from late October into January runs far beyond what a coastal filtration train is sized for, so stage properly — G4 pre-filter, F7 or F9 fine filter, terminal HEPA — instrument every stage with a differential pressure gauge, and budget consumables honestly. The same loading fouls technical-room condenser coils, where a cooling failure becomes an imaging shutdown.
Timeline and how we work at 1,400 km
A single-plane lab inside an existing shell runs 16-24 weeks from order to clinical handover. A Delhi retrofit in a live block adds two to six weeks for phasing, containment and night working; biplane and hybrid run 26-36 weeks. Where imaging delivery is long-lead it governs everything, which is why the purchase order and the AERB layout submission belong in the same month.
We have one office, in Pune, roughly 1,400 km away, and no presence in Delhi or anywhere in North India. The model is deliberate: survey within 5 to 7 working days by the engineer who will own the shielding design; a site team deployed to Delhi and resident for the continuous duration of the installation, under a named project manager through radiation survey and handover; consolidated consignments sequenced against the programme, since road freight is three to four days; an enlarged critical-spares handover, because a part that reaches a Pune hospital in four hours takes two days to reach Delhi; biomedical team training; and written AMC response windows — same-working-day remote diagnostics, an engineer on site within 48-72 hours.
For the full technical scope — shielding calculation method, the AERB sequence and the cost breakdown — see our cath lab setup service page.