The uptime economy
By admin September 1, 2026 5:48 pm IST
Across India’s biggest projects, procurement heads are quietly rewriting the rulebook. Equipment now earns its price over years, not on the showroom floor.
It’s 2031, somewhere along the high-speed rail corridor between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. A procurement head opens a dashboard rather than a purchase order. Twelve mobile crusher machines, placed at regular intervals along a 550-kilometre route, are reporting usage in real time. A batching plant that sat idle for six hours last week has already been redeployed forty kilometres south. Nobody is enquiring how much the crusher costs to buy. Everyone wants to know how much it costs per tonne to keep it moving.
That scene isn’t far-fetched. It’s close to where India’s largest projects already are. The country’s mining equipment industry, which was estimated at $6.8-8.3 billion in 2025, is expected to nearly treble by the early 2030s. Domestic heavy-equipment sales, meanwhile, fell roughly 4% year on year in the first quarter of FY2026. Buyers aren’t buying more equipment as market value rises, but unit quantities are falling. They make more deliberate purchases.
The line that changed the brief
Few people illustrate this better than Vibhab Joshi, Chief Operating Officer at Pedco India, who is working on the Mumbai–Ahmedabad bullet train project. “As bigger, more linear projects are coming… you cannot have a centralised concept of anything, be it crushing or batching plants,” he says. Spread across 550 km, the project makes a single fixed plant meaningless. His answer is mobile and modular capacity, stacked along the length of the corridor “so that the overall utilisation of your resources becomes most effective, most optimal, and the idle capacities are no longer there.”
Joshi’s team also writes that logic directly into contracts, which are bid documents that stipulate that ready-mix suppliers must be located within a specified radius—sometimes as close as 10 km—of the project site. Additionally, recycled materials are employed wherever they meet budgetary and environmental standards on JICA-funded sections with stringent ecological requirements. To put it another way, procurement is no longer a purchasing function. It’s a design project.
Standardise to move faster
One layer up from equipment deployment sits equipment selection, and Jaasvir Ahluwalia, Director at Genesis Infra Project Consultant, describes the same instinct applied there. Genesis Infra standardises roughly 70–75% of the equipment and systems it specifies across projects, reserving the remaining quarter for site-specific conditions — a split chosen deliberately to “reduce procurement timelines, simplify maintenance, improve spare availability and ensure consistent operational performance.” When Ahluwalia’s team selects an OEM partner, price is only the entry point. “Reliability, product quality, technical support, availability of spare parts, response time and after-sales service are equally important,” he says, adding that a dependable service network and long-term vendor stability matter most “especially for infrastructure projects where delays can significantly impact costs and timelines.”
That thinking extends even to redevelopment sites in the congested Mumbai Metropolitan Region, where Genesis Infra generally recommends compact, modular, and mobile equipment despite slightly higher running costs — because the savings show up elsewhere, in scheduling, safety, and execution efficiency. It’s the same arithmetic Joshi runs on a 550-km corridor, applied instead to a site measured in metres.
The fleet-level ledger
Equipment manufacturers are hearing the same brief from the other side of the table. “Customers are increasingly evaluating solutions based on lifecycle value, uptime, and operational efficiency rather than acquisition cost alone,” says Puneet Vidyarthi, Head of Brand Marketing at CASE Construction Equipment, APAC & India. For high-tonnage mining applications, he points to local manufacturing, parts availability, service responsiveness and component life as the variables that now decide a purchase, ahead of the invoice price. CASE’s myCASE telematics platform makes that arithmetic visible in real time by tracking machine location, fuel consumption, idle time, fault alerts, and service intervals, so fleet managers can catch a maintenance need before it becomes an unplanned breakdown.
What a screen panel teaches about cost
Ashar Locker India has transformed the same concept from a mindset into a working formula at the component level. “Total media cost, plus installation cost, plus cleaning and maintenance cost, plus production loss from downtime, plus cost of off-specification material divided by tonnes of saleable product produced,” is how National Sales Manager Anubhav Chandra frames every customer conversation. In one iron ore application, switching to cross-tension rubber screening media resulted in a ninefold increase in operating hours compared to the media it replaced, so it’s not just a theoretical exercise. An anti-clogging Polyveno Harp design reduced the amount of misdirected fine material in the oversize fraction from about 50% to less than 10% in a slag-screening application at a steel factory, extending running life from about three days to fifteen—nearly a five-fold improvement. “A screen that lasts longer but reduces open area or compromises separation efficiency is not necessarily economical,” Chandra cautions. The number that matters is cost per tonne of saleable product, not cost per panel.
Small attachment, same arithmetic
Even a bolt-on attachment follows the pattern. MB Crusher’s jaw-crusher buckets need servicing every 250 operating hours, a detail that sounds minor until CEO Guido Azzolin explains why the company now supplies an hour meter as standard on every unit. “It converts service from something a contractor remembers to something the machine tells him.” Without a parts pipeline and an engineer within reach of the site, he says plainly, “the attachment stops being an asset within a year.” MB Crusher now stocks wear products such as jaw plates in India rather than transporting them from Italy since lifecycle economics collapse when support fails.
When the clock costs money
Lifecycle thinking has teeth because contracts increasingly enforce it. Joshi notes that repeatedly replacing a project manager now triggers penalties, and missed milestones bring liquidated damages or temporary payment deductions. Rajkiran Kanagala, President & Chief Business Officer at TCI, sees the same pressure from the logistics side. As EPC penalty clauses tie directly to commissioning deadlines, “a heavy-haul movement that used to be a logistics footnote now sits on the critical path.” Even working capital has been drawn into the equation — Jackson Jacob, Chief Distribution Officer at Zuno General Insurance, points to insurance surety bonds, now permitted as an alternative to bank guarantees in mineral auctions, as a way for contractors to “preserve working capital… for project execution and business growth” rather than lock it up in guarantees.
One language, every category
What makes this pivot credible rather than coincidental is how consistently it repeats across categories that have nothing else in common. Vijayakumar Ekambaram of Palfinger India says customers evaluating lifting equipment and access platforms now weigh “lifecycle value, uptime, and operational efficiency rather than acquisition cost alone.” Tarique Salman of Vermeer Equipment India, describing an entirely different category — trenchless drilling and recycling equipment — reaches for nearly identical words. Buyers today evaluate machines on “total cost of ownership rather than just the initial purchase price.” Excavators, screen panels, crusher buckets, cranes, drilling rigs: five categories, one shared vocabulary, arrived at independently.
The bottom line
None of this is really a story about equipment getting smarter, though much of it is. Whether a machine is mounted onto the arm of a single excavator or stretched across 550 km of rail corridor, the story revolves around procurement heads who no longer separate a machine’s cost from its performance throughout the years it will be in use. The buyers listed here are not looking for the best deal. Instead of leaving it up to goodwill, they are now putting the lowest cost per tonne, per kilometre, or per hour of uptime straight into the contract. That pitch is no longer as effective for OEMs that continue to lead with a spec sheet and a sticker price. The one who walks in with a service network, a parts pipeline, and a cost-per-tonne model is the one who leaves with the order.
Quotes
Vibhab Joshi, Chief Operating Officer, Pedco India
“As bigger projects are coming, more linear projects are coming… the higher usage of mobile and modular concept of equipment is very, very relevant.”
Jaasvir Ahluwalia, Director, Genesis Infra Project Consultant
“We believe standardisation improves efficiency, but it should never come at the cost of project requirements.”
Puneet Vidyarthi, Head of Brand Marketing, CASE Construction Equipment, APAC & India
“Customers are increasingly looking beyond the initial purchase price when evaluating equipment.”
Anubhav Chandra, National Sales Manager, Ashar Locker India Private Limited
“The best outcomes are achieved when the OEM, operator and media specialist work together rather than treating the issue as a question of assigning fault.”
Guido Azzolin, CEO, MB Crusher
“A crusher bucket is a consumable-dependent system, not a bolt-on.”
Rajkiran Kanagala, President & Chief Business Officer, TCI
“A heavy-haul movement that used to be a logistics footnote now sits on the critical path.”
Jackson Jacob, Chief Distribution Officer, Zuno General Insurance
“The biggest advantage is preserving working capital and freeing up banking limits for project execution and business growth.”
Vijayakumar Ekambaram, General Manager – Business Development, Palfinger India Private Limited
“Customers are increasingly evaluating solutions based on lifecycle value, uptime, and operational efficiency rather than acquisition cost alone.”
Tarique Salman, Product Manager, Vermeer Equipment India Pvt. Ltd.
“Today’s contractors evaluate equipment based on total cost of ownership rather than just the initial purchase price.”
