India's construction equipment industry has a data problem, and it is an unusual one: the association that compiles the sector's official sales statistics says it cannot fully see what the country exports.
The Indian Construction Equipment Manufacturers' Association (ICEMA), whose members account for 95% of the equipment makers operating in India, has formally raised the issue with the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) and asked the Department of Commerce to create a mechanism for industry bodies to access trade data, according to the association's latest newsletter.
The complaint, on its face, is procedural. Its implications are not. At a moment when the industry's strategy and the government's strategy rest on exports, localisation and reduced import dependence, the association says it lacks "timely and credible trade data" to measure the market it is supposed to represent.
The gap in the numbers
The problem is most visible in what the industry calls non-OEM exports: machines shipped out of India not by the manufacturers themselves but by third parties, traders, dealers and exporters who buy equipment domestically and sell it abroad. These transactions never pass through a manufacturer's own books, so the only way to count them is through customs records. And those records, ICEMA says, are not fully available to it.
The consequence is written into the fine print of the association's own flagship publication. The annual sales report released with the newsletter, the document the industry, its financiers and the government use to gauge the sector's health, carries a footnote disclosing that non-OEM export figures for backhoe loaders and excavators, the two workhorse machines that dominate Indian construction sites, were sourced from a private data provider. More strikingly, the report states that non-OEM exports for March 2026, the final month of the financial year just closed, were simply "assumed at the same level" as March 2025 because actual figures were not available in time.
In other words, the definitive statistical record of a sector that sold 136,995 machines last year, and which the government cites in policy documents, closes its books each year with an estimate where a customs number should be.
The distortion is not trivial to the headline story. Exports were the standout performer of the year, surging 31.5% to 17,394 units even as domestic sales fell nearly 7%, according to the report. Non-OEM shipments are a meaningful slice of that export figure, and the slice measured with the least precision.
What ICEMA is asking for
The association's request is deliberately measured. It acknowledges "the importance of safeguarding sensitive information", a nod to the confidentiality concerns that led the government to restrict access to detailed, shipment-level trade data, but argues that the current limits create practical challenges for an industry trying to assess market size, track export activity and plan capacity.
ICEMA has asked the Department of Commerce to examine the issue and consider suitable mechanisms for giving industry bodies access to non-sensitive trade information, with appropriate confidentiality and data protection safeguards built in.
The wider Indian context
The construction equipment industry is not alone in this bind, but its predicament is a sharper version of a problem that runs across Indian manufacturing. Detailed customs data, the shipment-level records that show what left which port, at what value, and bound for where, was once widely available through commercial channels. Access tightened considerably from the mid-2010s onward on confidentiality grounds, pushing industry associations, analysts and researchers toward private data aggregators that reconstruct trade flows from whatever sources remain, at commercial rates and with varying reliability.
For the automotive sector broadly, this matters less: passenger vehicle, commercial vehicle and two-wheeler makers export through their own channels and report their own numbers, and the industry body SIAM publishes production and export data built from member submissions. The construction equipment industry's exposure is greater precisely because a chunk of its export trade flows through hands other than its members. The machines are counted when they are sold in India; where some of them ultimately go is, officially, a blind spot.
There is also a policy dimension with money attached. The government has announced a scheme to support construction and infrastructure equipment manufacturing, covering research, component localisation and export promotion, that the industry is waiting to see notified. Designing export incentives, and later evaluating whether they worked, requires knowing the export baseline. An industry that must estimate its own March numbers is a weak foundation for evidence-based scheme design, a point that gives ICEMA's request a resonance beyond its own membership.
What happens next?
The outcome will be worth watching well beyond the construction equipment sector. If the commerce ministry constructs a workable template, aggregated, anonymised trade data shared with recognised industry bodies under safeguards, it would set a precedent that associations across Indian manufacturing would likely queue up to use. If it declines, the message is equally clear: even the industries the government is counting on to power its export ambitions will keep counting in the dark.