Whenever you come across high rise buildings you wonder how these buildings are kept spick-and-span. Then you spot a person crawling up there on the outside of the building leaving it clean behind him. Yes! He is cleaning the façade of the building making it an attractive edifice. Window cleaning is one of the upcoming skilled jobs in India.
As India’s economy grows, so does its corporate business, and so do its new buildings. The latest trend in construction is the heavy use of glass on the outer side. Any of the hotels that you see now have fixed windows. To be able to clean the façade of these buildings you need to come from the outside of the building because you can’t do that from inside. What is basically provided by the window cleaning service is that they try and use the construction on the building itself. Window cleaners also use other equipment and go outside the building with all the safety measures and assistance and then basically clean each window panel. It not only requires systems designed to access these buildings, the window cleaners also need to undergo special training to be able to perform the job efficiently.
Window cleaning as a profession existed in Britain even in early 20th century. The first organisation to represent window cleaners throughout Great Britain was founded as early as the late 1940s and came to be known as the National Federation of Master Window Cleaners. In India, it has just begun. Suhag Khemlani and her company Cleanindia group are one of the first few to have entered the profession. She started nearly 14 years back when window cleaning or façade cleaning was a very new concept in India. The architects or the construction companies were not really into it. “It was almost like bringing about a pulse of change in the people and telling them that you need to get your windows clean. We are talking about a time when people felt that rains will clean the windows so they felt no need of people like us,” says Khemlani, Director of Technoclean India Pvt Ltd, the largest facade cleaning company of India.
Khemlani works with some of the country’s best architects and top construction companies and builders. But she complains that cleaning the façade is not taken seriously in India still. “We still come across people who don’t believe in window cleaning and contracts like this. But there are a lot of top builders and architects in the country, who are aware of the fact that they need assistance…we are involved with the architects even before a building construction starts,” says Khemlani. The need to use latest technology in window cleaning is also explained by Brent Weingard, owner of Expert Window Cleaners in New York City when he says that if you still clean the windows in the traditional form, then “you’re just moving dirt around from one spot to another and putting a static charge on the glass, which attracts dust and dirt.”
Though anybody can enroll for the training in window cleaning, there are some basic requirements. A window cleaner should not have acrophobia (fear of heights) as the work requires going to major heights. While the minimum qualification required is XIIth pass, the window cleaners should be able to communicate well in English as the job requires a lot of paperwork with the clients. Khemlani’s company encourages the employees to go for English or computer classes. Khemlani also urges for entry of more women in the profession, as it has always been a male-centric work.
The window cleaners need to go through a professional training to be able to do a good and safe job. “All of our window cleaners go for a very thorough medical examination as they are working on heights. They have all the protection. They all go for a one-month training programme. For the first time, a window cleaner goes for a month-long training programme which is a classroom training. They have to understand the technique of window cleaning. They would actually be at the ground level, cleaning windows. They would be doing that 15-20 times to know the technique of window cleaning as even the hand movements have a special technique in case of window cleaning. They also need to learn all the safety features,” she says.
The growth prospects in this field are also encouraging. Those who began as window cleaners in Cleanindia, hold managerial positions in the company today. It could be possible only because of the training in communication and computer skills that cleaners learnt at an early stage.
To know more about window cleaning business, log on to www.windowcleaningdirectory.net or www.cleanindiagroup.com |