The consortium of state-run Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd and Titagarh Wagons emerged as the second-lowest bidder, documents reviewed by Moneycontrol show. While 120 of these trains will be made at the railways Latur facility, 80 will be made in Chennai factory
www.moneycontrol.com
This is so bad! I don't understand why IR has even allowed a company to bid whose country has been sanctioned to hell. TMH will probably face hurdles in sourcing western components, so they'll resort to importing from China. RVNL has no clue how to make coaches, so they'll be fully dependent on TMH and do screwdriver giri with components imported from Russia and China.
The other bidders had good experience in building trains and had factories in India. Unfortunately, we'll be stuck with Russian junk (thankfully only 120 trainsets). Is there any way IR can disqualify TMH?
Yeah IR babus have totally screwed up here by letting the Russians participate in the first place and it’s far worse than just the lack of control over their supply chain the Russian side has, they are a sanctioned entity and if this continues RVNL and their business interests are at serious risk of being targeted by secondary sanctions, G7 are getting far more aggressive in their sanctions against Russian entities now.
but a minor point- Russians/RVNL won’t be setting up the factories. As per this tender L1 will get use of an IR factory in Latur and L2 in Chennai (GOCO model).
On the positive side, L2 can make 40% of the 200 and if they agree to match L1’s unit cost and it looks like L2 is certain to match the L1 price, really positive interview with lots of details on the VB plans and worth watching:
Funnily enough Titagarh are happier with the L2’s assigned factory (Chennai)
as he says, this will transform his company into a global player, the tragedy is 60% of this order will go to L1 to help build up Russian industry. The Russian firm has zero prior experience in india, at the very least giving this to alstom or Siemens would’ve rewarded them for localising inside india.
At least the aluminium VB trains don’t have any shady Russian bidders
it feels like India got played here, the Russian bid/company is highly suspect given they have zero former operations in India and given that this contract is not just for manufacture but decades of maintenance tying oneself to a Russian entity at this stage seems suicidal
for some short term pain (6-8 months to re-tender) the IR can save themselves decades of pain and also deliver a huge win for Indian industry. The more I think of the Russian win the more I’m disgusted by it. PMO is run by some very competent people, I hope this one doesn’t get passed