Storing cement through the monsoon

A bag of ordinary portland cement carries eight markings, and two of them are dates. One is the batch or control unit number, given in terms of the week, the month and the year of packing. The three that carry no figure at all are the maker's name and its trademark, the name and designation of the cement itself, and the address of the manufacturer. The other is a best before date, which the requirement fixes at 3 months from the date of packing. A third line spells out in words that cement more than 3 months old needs testing to check conformity before it is used. All three are printed on the sack together, so a bag too old to use without a test says so on its own paper.

The same list carries an instruction that is not a date and belongs here anyway: the words Use No Hooks. UltraTech gives the reason on its storage page. A hook tears the bag, a tear lets air and moisture in, and a hole small enough to miss is enough to harden cement inside a sack that still looks whole from the outside.

Net quantity is on the list too, at 50 kg per bag unless something else is specified. Do not lean on that number: it moves across SKUs and regions, so the weight printed on the sack in front of you is the weight, and the 50 kg is only the default that printing is measured against.

The IS 269:2015 wording is exact about whose hands the cement is in. Cement held in bulk at the factory before shipment gets six months. Cement in bags, in local storage such as in the hands of a vendor, gets 3 months after the completion of tests, and then a retest before use. A dealer is that vendor, so the clock runs on a bag sitting in a dealer's godown just as it runs on one already at your site.

Which means the three months do not start on the day you buy. They start at the week printed on the sack, and part of them has already gone by the time a load is standing in a village in Supaul.

That is why the order of a stack matters more than how neat it looks. Both makers say the same two things about it: take the oldest bags first, and take out of the stack only what the day's work needs. UltraTech adds the check that costs nothing, which is to refuse bags that are already hard or lumpy at the time of delivery. The moment to look is while the vehicle is still standing there.

Tell us the day the work starts and tell us where the bags will stand until then, because a covered room and a sheet in an open yard are two different loads. We reach all 34 blocks of Saharsa, Supaul and Madhepura in our own vehicles, tempo to tractor to truck, charged at the market rate for that route. Ask us to read the packing week off the bags before they go on the vehicle, and ask it again if the order is split across two trips.

Cement rarely travels alone. Binding wire, cover blocks and waterproofing liquid ride out with the bori, and the sheet that covers the sacks covers those too. What each sack actually is, bag by bag, sits on its own page: UltraTech and Nuvoco are the two makers quoted above, and the sariya weight chart does the same job for the steel going on the same trip.

A retest is a laboratory job, not a look. No opinion given at a counter can settle whether one particular bag is still fit for work; the standard's own answer to a sack past its date is a test for conformity, done in a lab.

The CAMTECH pamphlet is guidance from the Ministry of Railways on IS 269:2015, and it says on its own first page that it does not replace the standard's existing provisions. Where an engineer, a department or a tender names a rule stricter than what is set out here, that stricter rule is the one for your job.