The Indian market for road construction equipment has seen a meteoric rise in the past few years mainly owing to the Government's thrust on expanding the national highways and state and rural roads networks. Road construction equipment of every kind, from crushing and screening plants to asphalt plants, asphalt and concrete pavers, compactors and motor graders, is being increasingly sought by contractors executing road construction projects.
Our country has the third largest road network across the globe consisting of National Highways, State Highways, Major District Roads and Village and Other District Roads. While the National Highways comprise only 2% of the total length of roads, they carry over 40% of the total traffic across four different corners of our country.
Starting with the 9th Five Year Plan (1997-2002), road sector expenditures have gone up from 3% of the total Plan expenditure to almost 12% today. These expenditures were primarily for national highway and rural road development programs. The Eleventh Plan indicates a total planned investment of about INR 2, 09,400 Crores in road infrastructure and road construction equipment contributes about 21-23 per cent of the total project cost in road projects. This should be ample evidence about the growth potential for road construction equipment industry in India. However, the industry relies on the efficient and timely allocation of funds to national road development projects. Delays in the implementation of these projects will inevitably result in slowing down or delaying the expected industry growth.
Road Construction Equipment Market From Evolution to Present
The road construction equipment market has undergone a sea change since its early days. The 1960s heralded the mechanization of the entire process. The globalization of the Indian economy in 1991 also brought about the much required impetus to the road construction equipment industry. Indian manufacturers tied up with foreign partners for R&D and improvisation of their products. The modification of specifications as required by MORT&H also gave a boost to R&D, innovations and collaborations. Previously, while a single static road roller was used for the compaction of the sub grade, sub base, base and black topped layers, the practice is now to use a different type of road roller for each layer, like soil compactors, tandem vibratory rollers and pneumatic tyred rollers. The demand for hot mixed plants has moved from small capacities like 20-30 TPH to 120-400 TPH in road projects. Conventional rigid paves are increasingly being substituted with hydrostatic drive pavers with grade & slope control. The market is already familiar with technology and machines like wet mix plants, cold and hot milling machines, pavers for the construction of base course and cold and hot re-cycling machines that can reduce the thickness of the road crust and also have the ability to recycle the used material during road construction.
Here is a brief description of the road construction process. Any heavy infrastructure project begins with site clearance. Then, a motor grader makes the sub-base flat to a certain extent. The motor grader also helps in profiling the sub-base. After this, a soil compactor or a single drum compactor is used to compact the soil. This also helps in increasing the load bearing capacity. Generally, a smooth drum is used for non-cohesive soils and a pad foot drum with feet for soils such as clay or silt. Specially graded aggregate is then brought in to form the unbound base course. The next step involves laying the first bituminous base course, a carefully designed and manufactured mixture of asphalt and aggregate - hot with an asphalt pavers. It is essential that the asphalt remain at high temperatures up to the point of being laid. After this, a tracked or wheeled paver is used to put down multiple binder layers based on the traffic loads the road is expected to carry. The thickness of the first binder layers may vary from 100-150 mm. A tandem roller then follows behind the paver to compact each layer before the final wearing course of about 50mm of asphalt is put down.
Key Equipments for Road Construction:
Dozers, Excavators, loaders and dump trucks are key equipments required for site clearance and earth work at the start of road construction project. Motor Graders, Wet Mix Plants and Soil Compactors are mostly employed for base and sub base preparation. Bitumen Sprayers, Asphalt Plants, Asphalt Pavers, Road Rollers are required during black topping of the road surface. Apart from these equipments, Concrete Batching Plants, Concrete Mixers, Concrete Pavers, Kerb Pavers are essential for bridge and kerb construction. Road Marking machine is required at the final stage of the road construction before opening the road for vehicles.
Key Players of Road Construction Equipments:
The key indigenous and foreign players are Gujarat Apollo, JCB, L & T, Ingersoll Rand, Schwing Stetter, Hitachi, BEML, Cotton Greaves, Volvo, Wirtgen, Amman and others. Many other foreign companies are also planning to enter in the Indian market by setting up the sales and service offices or setting the production units.
There are many indigenous SSI units having considerable market share in there segment. They are mainly into manufacturing of Asphalt Drum Mix Plants, Asphalt Pavers, Bitumen Sprayers, Concrete Batching Plants, Wet Mix Plants and Stone Crushers.
Constraints
There have been concerns among the industry and its stakeholders that there is a huge gap between demand and supply for improved roads and the domestic construction industry is still in its initial stage to meet the future demand. Most industry experts also agree that timely execution and completion of projects is another aspect of concern, the underlying reason being undue delays made by the Government while making decisions.
Companies are proactively addressing issues like unavailability of spare parts and lack of skilled manpower that have plagued the industry for long. There is also a major thrust on increasing production capacities, R&D and innovation with more and more players introducing world class technology for Indian contractors.
The current UPA government had earlier set itself an ambitious target of developing 20 kilometers of new roads per day and building 35,000 km of new roads by the year 2014. However former surface union transports Minister Mr. Kamal Nath acknowledged openly that this may not be the case. Issues relating to land acquisition and awarding of contracts have marred the target reducing it to 12-13 kilometers per day as of Mar 2011. But the road for construction equipment market remains bullish.
