Roughly 6,500 Indian-built excavators and backhoe loaders left the country through unauthorised channels last year, a trade the managing director of CASE Construction Equipment India puts at Rs 3,900-4,500 crore. For anyone buying, financing or reselling a machine in India, that leakage is not an abstract customs problem. It quietly props up used prices, and it is why your dealer now wants to see your site before handing over a four-wheel-drive backhoe.
The figures come from an interview Shalabh Chaturvedi, managing director of CASE Construction Equipment India and SAARC, gave to Autocar Professional, published on 31 July 2026. CASE is CNH Industrial’s construction-equipment brand. Treat the numbers as an industry estimate rather than a customs count, and that caveat is the story: Chaturvedi says manufacturers once tracked the pattern through customs-based trade reports, and a clampdown on agencies publishing export data has removed that visibility. “We still don’t have a clear, definitive answer from the government on how we can get access to this data,” he said. ICEMA has separately asked the customs board and the commerce ministry to restore aggregated access.
The pull is price arbitrage: a machine bought in India sells for materially more in African and West Asian markets. The twist is that the machines often do not survive the trip. Indian equipment now meets BS-V norms with after-treatment built for low-sulphur diesel, while much of the destination market runs Stage 3 or unregulated fuel. “When you take a Stage 5 machine there and you put in fuel with high sulphur content, in just two or three tanks of fuel, the engine comes off,” Chaturvedi said. He conceded the counter-measures are partial: “None of these are foolproof.”
Start with resale. If 5,000 excavators and 1,500 backhoes a year are pulled out of the domestic parc, the used market is tighter than headline demand suggests. Domestic sales fell about 7% in FY26, which reads like a slump, yet used excavator and backhoe values have held better than that. Export pull is a plausible part of the reason. Selling a five-year-old 20-tonne machine, you likely have more room than the sales data implies. Buying used, expect less of a bargain.
Second, friction is rising on exactly the specs most in demand. Dealer verification of your work site before delivery, and restricted availability of four-wheel-drive variants, are aimed at proxy buyers rather than at you, but they still land as extra paperwork and longer lead times. Budget for that if a 4WD backhoe is what the job actually needs.
Third, assume your machine is visible. Telematics is fitted and actively monitored, so a resale that ends at a port can be traced. That matters most if the machine is still hypothecated: diverting financed equipment during the charge period is the failure lenders worry about, and it feeds the tighter end-use and RC transfer checks buyers already meet when financing a machine.
Our take: the Rs 4,000 crore figure is one manufacturer’s estimate of something nobody can currently measure, so hold the precision lightly. The direction is harder to argue with. Exports are the one part of this industry growing while domestic demand shrinks, and some of that growth is happening outside the official channel.
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CASE Construction Equipment India estimates about 6,500 machines went out without authorisation last year, roughly 5,000 excavators and 1,500 backhoe loaders, worth Rs 3,900-4,500 crore. It is an industry estimate rather than an official customs count, because manufacturers no longer have access to the export data that would confirm it.
Price arbitrage. The same machine sells for considerably more in African and West Asian markets than in India, so traders buy locally and ship abroad for the margin. CASE puts overseas excavator prices at $70,000-80,000 and backhoe loaders at $40,000-50,000 a unit.
Probably yes, indirectly. Machines leaving the country do not return to the domestic used market, so supply of late-model excavators and backhoe loaders is thinner than domestic sales figures alone suggest. That supports resale values for sellers and reduces bargaining room for buyers.
Related on DesiMachines: ICEMA FY26 data: what slower sales mean for equipment buyers
Source: Autocar Professional
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