Ending drought of high-value procurement, Indian Railways has given out orders for coaches for the first time this year, giving respite to the industry dependent upon country's biggest employment provider.
Railways has just given out orders for about 1,350 cast steel bogies to be used by Container Corp of India for its flat wagons.
The order was based on a tender floated earlier in September.
This would benefit four manufacturers, only one of which is a listed entity, Simplex Castings Ltd.
The total value of the coaches is Rs 30 crore at prices ranging from Rs 1.82 lakh to Rs 2.19 lakh, according to the order details.
Simplex, owned by the Kolkata-based Mundhras, incidentally is not a traditional manufacturer of either wagons or coaches and has been concentrating mostly on civil construction and engineering. It has bagged orders for 506 coaches worth Rs 11.30 crore.
Other companies which got shares of the pie -- Frontier Alloy Steels, Orient Steel & Industries and Hindustan Engineering and Industries -- also aren't traditional wagon makers such as Texmaco Rail and Engineering and Titagarh Industries, which have also forayed into coach making in recent times.
The previous order of similar kind that rolled out in the current fiscal from the Railways was in September, also for steel cast bogies. And the biggest beneficiary was Titagarh Wagons which bagged order for 1010 such bogies valued at Rs 24 crore. Others were Texmaco, which got mandate for 490 units worth Rs 11.70 crore.
Raneka Industries of Pitampur and Siena Engineering of Indore got orders for 300 and 200 orders, respectively.
Public sector BEML at that time got a separate order for 310 sleeper coaches with bogie mounted air brakes, worth Rs 165.66 crore.
With the orders for the bogies arriving, Railways dependent manufacturers are now eagerly waiting for announcements on wagons, the key driver for their revenues, to flow in soon.
Tender for procurement of 11,728 wagons was floated in October.
But actual order hasn't happened for a long time, partly because Cimmco Ltd, owned by Chowdhurys of Titagarh, had moved the Supreme Court demanding that the sick company it acquired from the Birlas deserves more orders till it turns around, something which the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction had directed.
In February 2013, the apex court ruled in favour of Cimmco dismissing a special leave petition filed by the Railways against a Delhi High Court order.
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