Bridge and Tunnel Construction Equipment in India: Models, Tenders, Companies and News

What counts as bridge and tunnel construction equipment?

It is the set of machines that builds a crossing from the foundation up: river and road bridges, flyovers, road over bridges and road under bridges, viaducts, elevated corridors, and road, rail and hydro tunnels. A good share of the machine work on a bridge happens before the deck. Excavators dig the well and pile cap pits, concrete reaches the piers by pump or straight from the mixer, and a pick and carry crane moves steel cages, shuttering and small girders around the yard.

In a drill and blast tunnel the face is drilled, blasted and the broken rock is loaded out, and that loading needs machines sized for the tube. The specialist plant on these sites is not listed on DesiMachines: piling rigs, launching girders, crawler and tower cranes, truck-mounted boom pumps, tunnel boring machines, drilling jumbos and shotcrete machines. The machines below are the ones a fleet owner can put to work on the same site.

Where is bridge and tunnel work concentrated in India?

Tunnels and high bridges sit mostly in the Himalaya and the north-east. The Border Roads Organisation, which works under the Ministry of Defence, built the Atal Tunnel under the Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh and the Sela Tunnel in Arunachal Pradesh. According to Konkan Railway, it built the Chenab and Anji rail bridges and the tunnels on its section of the Udhampur, Srinagar and Baramulla rail link in Jammu & Kashmir.

NHIDCL, a company of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, runs the Z-Morh and Zojila tunnel works on the Sonamarg to Kargil road into Ladakh. Its own project list also covers Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura.

In the plains the work is mostly river crossings, flyovers, road over bridges at level crossings and elevated roads in cities. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has listed the Ganga and Varuna elevated corridors in Uttar Pradesh among its approved projects. Each state page lists the machines, dealers and tenders for that state.

Who builds India’s bridges and tunnels?

National highway bridges and tunnels are tendered by NHAI and NHIDCL, border roads by the Border Roads Organisation, and rail bridges by the railway zones and rail companies. Machine owners usually reach the work by hiring to the contractors below or to their sub-contractors. The list is alphabetical, not a ranking.

A wider list of infrastructure contractors is in our roundup of the top EPC companies in India.