Bharatmala has a significant impact on the demand for construction equipment, especially Excavators, Backhoe Loaders, Wheel Loaders and road construction equipment.
Rahul Shorey National Head, Construction, Tata Hitachi Construction Machinery Company How do you perceive the opportunities getting better for the OEMs in the construction equipment industry as the Bharatmala project aims to ensure speeding
– Rahul Shorey
National Head, Construction, Tata Hitachi Construction Machinery Company
How do you perceive the opportunities getting better for the OEMs in the construction equipment industry as the Bharatmala project aims to ensure speeding up approval processes to enable quicker execution of projects?
There is a high correlation between highway construction and sales of construction equipment comprising of excavators, wheel loaders and road construction equipment. Considering this, Bharatmala project is a very important driver of CE growth in the country. Currently over 75% of the 34,800km of Bharatmala is yet to be constructed, and the ministry recently conveyed that the project will be completed by 2026-27. This ensures a sustained quantum of demand for construction equipment over the next 5 years.
Which of your equipment are employed in the Bharatmala project? What are your major contributions in this project?
Our equipment used in the Bharatmala project includes our wide range of technologically advanced excavators, backhoe loaders and wheel loaders. Our EX Super+ Series and ZAXIS GI Series of excavators have been deployed, which come loaded with features like online access to location of equipment, online health monitoring system, among several other parameters, apart from numerous other improvements. Hitachi Construction Machinery (HCM) has been a pioneer in developing hydraulic technology used in excavators, which includes the technologically superior HIOS III system that the ZAXIS GI Series are equipped with. These use regenerative hydraulics that reutilizes the returning pressurized flow through a regenerative circuit and channelizes this to areas with high demand of oil. This improves the productivity of the machines without incurring additional fuel expenses. Our backhoe loaders under the Shinrai brand and state-of-the-art wheel loaders are also being utilised in these projects.
Added to this mix is our suite of telematics solutions, ConSite and InSite, a next generation service solution that harnesses the power of Information Communication Technology to deliver monthly reports to customers, provide summary reports that give an overview of the operation of all the fleet owner’s machines, and detailed reports on information about individual machines. In addition, through its remote fleet management system, ConSite allows the customer easy access to real time operating information to increase machine productivity and reduce downtime. It also offers a convenient and simple system which has been designed to give customers from the convenience of their offices, access to valuable information regarding operations, maintenance, system parameters and alarms of their machines. Alarms are also reported to our support team to resolve issues quickly and proactively.
The multiple modes of operation on offer in the equipment, allows for the flexibility of use for precision work or mass and faster excavation, as the case maybe. All these features enable easier use of the machine as well as progress faster in construction by improving availability at site and improved logistics management.
Can you elaborate or provide suggestions that need to be incorporated by the government to ensure not just the success of the programme, but also growth for the construction equipment manufacturers?
As explained earlier, Bharatmala and highway construction in general has a significant impact of the demand for construction equipment, especially excavators, backhoe loaders, wheel loaders and road construction equipment. For the sustained growth of the CE industry therefore, the construction of highways also needs to grow commensurately over the next 5 years.
Execution has become a challenge in recent times. After hitting a record of 37km per day in 2020-21, execution contracted to 29km per day last year. This had a major impact on demand for CE in the 2nd half of last year, as we were coming out of the effect of the second wave of Covid-19.
There is a need to plan well ahead, not just in terms of awards, but also factoring all elements that affect execution of the project like land acquisition, forest clearances, utility shifting, clearances from local authorities for borrow earth area, sand and blue metal, support of local law enforcement agencies, to name a few. It is imperative that most of these clearances are in place at the time of award of project to ensure smoother execution of projects going forward.
These measures need to be taken up and acted upon, now that highway construction is part of PM GatiShakti, and all relevant information is available on the integrated platform to enable faster action and removal of bottlenecks. It would also help the CE industry if the Ministry releases an annual roadmap of Bharatmala targets for construction over the next 5 years, that will enable better planning of production.
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