A lot of drilling advice online is written for houses built from timber studs and plasterboard. Walls here are usually not that. In and around Bhopal you are most often drilling into burnt clay brick with cement plaster, into concrete block, or into a reinforced concrete beam or column. Each behaves differently, and the difference decides whether your shelf holds.

Telling them apart before you drill

Tap the wall with a knuckle. Brick and block give a dull, solid knock. RCC gives a harder, higher note and feels unyielding. If you are near the top of a wall, near a corner, or directly above a door or window opening, you are more likely to be in concrete — that is where beams and lintels sit.

A first shallow hole tells you the rest. Red or brown dust means clay brick. Grey, gritty dust means concrete or block. If the drill suddenly stops advancing in grey dust and the bit starts skidding, you have likely met steel reinforcement — move across by 50–75 mm and start again rather than forcing it.

Hammer mode is not optional

Masonry needs percussion. A driver drill turning a masonry bit will polish a shallow crater in concrete and go no further, and you will blame the bit. If your tool has a hammer setting, use it for brick and concrete; switch it off for wood and for driving screws, where percussion only chews the material.

Several cordless kits on this site are drill-drivers without a hammer function. They are excellent for furniture, cupboard hinges and pilot holes in wood, and they will struggle on an RCC lintel. That is a limit worth knowing before you buy, not after.

The plug matters as much as the hole

The most common reason a shelf pulls out is not a weak wall — it is a hole drilled oversize. A wall plug relies on being squeezed. Match the bit to the plug, drill slightly deeper than the plug is long so dust has somewhere to go, and blow or vacuum the hole out before you insert it. A plug seated on a bed of dust is only half gripping.

Practical sequence

1. Mark the point and check nothing electrical runs vertically or horizontally from a nearby switch or socket.
2. Start at low speed without hammer to break the plaster cleanly and stop the bit wandering.
3. Switch to hammer and let the tool’s weight do the work — leaning on it overheats the tip.
4. Withdraw the bit once or twice mid-hole to clear dust.
5. Clear the hole, tap the plug flush, then drive the screw.

Go slowly on the plaster layer in particular. Plaster chips outward, and a cratered surface around an otherwise good hole is the part you cannot hide behind a bracket.