From imported machinery to homegrown engineering — India is now building the entire lifecycle of Tunnel Boring Machines within its own borders. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw declared on Thursday, 22 October 2026 that the complete TBM ecosystem — design, manufacturing, and maintenance — is taking shape in India, calling it a milestone for Aatmanirbhar Bharat.

From Germany and China to Made-in-India

For decades, Tunnel Boring Machines were almost entirely sourced from overseas — principally Germany and China — making every metro line, railway tunnel, and highway bore dependent on foreign supply chains, foreign spare parts, and foreign engineers. The machines are not small purchases: a single TBM can cost tens of millions of dollars, and downtime for maintenance compounds project delays into years.

Vaishnaw's post lays out a three-stage arc — Design ➡️ Manufacturing ➡️ Maintenance — that signals India is not merely assembling imported components but building indigenous capability at every link in the chain. That distinction matters enormously for long-term infrastructure economics.

Why TBMs Are Central to India's Infrastructure Ambition

Indian Railways alone is executing tunneling works across mountainous corridors in the Northeast, Jammu & Kashmir, and the Western Ghats. Urban metro networks in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad are drilling deeper and longer routes than ever before. Each of these projects runs on TBMs — and historically, every breakdown meant waiting on a foreign OEM.

Bringing design and manufacturing onshore directly reduces project timelines and foreign-exchange outflows. It also seeds a domestic heavy-engineering workforce — technicians, metallurgists, and precision machinists — whose skills compound across other capital-goods sectors.

Aatmanirbhar Bharat's Heavy-Engineering Frontier

The Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiative, launched in May 2020 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, set out to reduce import dependence across strategic sectors. Early wins came in defence and semiconductors. TBMs represent a harder frontier — complex, bespoke machines where global supply is dominated by a handful of European and East Asian players.

Indigenising TBMs would place India in a rare club. It also strengthens India's negotiating position in infrastructure diplomacy, particularly as it exports engineering expertise to neighbouring and Global South countries.

India's tunneling ambition is no longer just about digging through mountains — it is about who builds the machine that does it. That shift is what Vaishnaw is pointing to, and it has consequences that outlast any single project.