Increased roadbuilding activity in India drives up demand for tippers

The government’s increased focus on roadbuilding in the form of national highway projects across the country has given a fillip to sales of tippers.  

Continuing its growth momentum of 2015-16, the medium and heavy commercial vehicles (M&HCV) segment continues to post strong growth. This is also thanks to higher tipper sales in the first two months of 2016-17. 

Heavy tippers including those in the 25T, 31T and 37T category, are primarily used in road construction activities and recent projects awarded by the government has seen their sales surge. The partial lifting of ban on mining activities has also given a boost to tipper sales.

During April-May 2016, the sale of tippers has exceeded overall industry growth. In the 35T tipper segment, overall sales numbers were was 1,345 units as compared to 702 units in April-May 2015, growing year on year by a massive 91.5%.   

The 25T segment including haulage and tipper has grown 22 percent in April-May 2016 with total sales of 9,508 units. The 31T segment, which is a popular tipper segment, has registered double-digit growth of 17 percent during the same period, selling 18,055 units.

Commenting on the growth in tippers to a private news channel, Vinod Dasari, managing director, Ashok Leyland, said, “Tipper sales are actually coming back. Last year saw good growth of  about 20%. But this year it’s growing at about 65-70% already and I think this will be a very good year for tippers, both because of road construction as well as mining opening up.”

The M&HCV segment, which posted over 30% growth in 2015-16, is likely to see 12-15% growth in 2016-17. It is also projected that the LCV segment, which has seen sluggish slaes over the past two years, is likely to grow 10-12 percent and give new momentum to overall CV sales. Also, the second half of this fiscal should be very good for CV manufacturers due to pre-buying as a result of BS-IV coming into play from April 2017.

The onset of the monsoon across the country is also a harbinger of good fortunes for the CV industry as agricultural produce will rise and there will be a need for transportation in rural India.

Government push to the sector

Driving the growth momentum of new infrastructure across the country, the government in May and June 2016 has approved several road development projects at an estimated cost of over Rs 14,000 crore. This includes four-laning of the Angul-Sambalpur section of NH-42 (New NH-55) in Odisha at an estimated of Rs 2,491 crore, four-laning of the Phagwara-Rupnagar section of NH-344A in Punjab, estimated cost of Rs 1,444.42 crore, Hubli-Hospet section of NH-63 in Karnataka at an estimated Rs 2,272.20 crore, and 4/6-laning of the Kharar-Ludhiana section of NH-95 (New NH-05) in Punjab an estimated cost of Rs 2,069.70 crore.

Asking all the stakeholders to make conscious and active use of innovations and best practices from around the world in engineering and road construction, Union Minister of Road Transport & Highways and Shipping, Nitin Gadkari, said the road transport sector in the country has immense potential given the high traffic density and adequate availability of resources.

MoRTH had brought in many policy changes to streamline procedures and ease out road blocks like land acquisition, environment clearances and paucity of funds. Technological initiatives have also been brought in like satellite-based road asset management systems, use of concrete for road construction, electronic toll collection, INAMPRO and other IT initiatives. All these are aimed at making the roadbuilding procedure faster, more transparent and more efficient.