Build It All or Build It Together? India's Answer to the Tunnel-Machine Chokepoint

Build It All or Build It Together?

China's export controls on tunnel boring machines force India to answer a hard question. If a machine is strategic, should India build all of it at home, whatever the cost? Or should it build what it can with trusted partners and accept that some dependence will remain? Both answers protect something real.

The case for full indigenisation TBMs are dual-use.

The same machine that bores a metro line can carve an all-weather tunnel near a contested border and the Border Roads Organisation relies heavily on such equipment for strategic connectivity in the Himalayas. Advocates of full indigenisation argue that any foreign part in such a machine is a potential choke point in a crisis.

They point to China's own path. Its industry grew from a large importer of TBMs into a producer that now holds about 70% of the global market, through sustained state backing and technology absorption. On this view, India should back a national champion and accept higher costs now for strategic autonomy later.

The lesson of gallium, germanium, graphite and rare-earth magnets is that dependence will be used against you.

The case for licensed co-production and shared capacity The opposing case starts from how TBMs are made.

Each machine must be configured to the geology of its site and each project is effectively bespoke. A plant needs a minimum order book and an ecosystem able to design, make and repair specialised parts. India's experience shows what happens without those conditions.

BEML's attempts at TBM partnerships faltered for want of secure licensing and steady demand. Herrenknecht has assembled and refurbished TBMs in Chennai since 2007-08, but still depends on imported core components. Insisting that every sophisticated machine be made at home, the editorial warns, would send public infrastructure costs soaring.

The better route, on this view, is to make machines in India under licence from established German or Japanese firms and to build shared capacity, such as common testing and precision-manufacturing facilities, that many firms can use.

Government already has a tool for this: Phase II of the capital goods competitiveness scheme, with Rs 975 crore for common engineering facilities.

Where this leaves us TAN's position is that licensed co-production with shared industrial capacity is the right method, with one firm condition: a security floor for strategic tunnels.

The decisive fact is demand. A national champion without a steady order book does not become China's CRCHI; it becomes another BEML. Even India's flagship project, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail, uses 13.1-metre machines from CRCHI because no other supply made economic sense.

Pooling orders from metro, rail, hydropower and border projects and building shared capability, gives India a realistic way to raise its domestic share of each machine over time. The security floor matters too. For border tunnels, India should guarantee domestic refurbishment capacity, stockpiles of critical spares and sourcing from partners outside China.

That costs money, but less than an embargo during a crisis. What would change TAN's view: if licensing partners proved unwilling to transfer real design capability or if border projects needed volumes large enough to sustain a dedicated national manufacturer.