Siemens Mobility has handed Indian Railways the first D9 electric freight locomotive assembled at Dahod, opening deliveries on a 3bn euro, 1,200-unit order. It lands against a Union Budget that raised central capital expenditure to 12.2 lakh crore rupees and a highways authority that beat its construction target by 15 per cent.
Siemens Mobility has handed over the first D9 electric freight locomotive built at Dahod in Gujarat to Indian Railways, opening deliveries on a 1,200-unit order that is the largest in the company's history and one of the clearest measures of what India's infrastructure programme is now worth to industrial suppliers based outside the country.
The contract, worth about €3bn, covers the design, manufacture and commissioning of 1,200 nine-thousand-horsepower electric freight locomotives over eleven years, together with 35 years of full-service maintenance from depots at Visakhapatnam, Raipur, Kharagpur and Pune. Assembly is at the Indian Railways works at Dahod. Siemens won the tender against Alstom in early 2023, which puts the first machine into commercial service roughly three years after award, quick for a rolling stock programme of this size.
The structure of the deal is as significant as its value. It is not an export order. The locomotives are built in India, maintained in India for a period longer than the working life of most industrial equipment, and paid for out of a railway budget that keeps rising.
The Union Budget for 2026-27, presented on 1 February, raised central capital expenditure to ₹12.2 lakh crore, about 3.1 per cent of GDP, from ₹11.2 lakh crore the year before. Indian Railways received ₹2.78 lakh crore, an increase of 10.8 per cent, of which ₹1.2 lakh crore is earmarked for safety work including deployment of the Kavach train protection system. Within that allocation, ₹36,721 crore goes to new lines, ₹37,750 crore to doubling, ₹22,853 crore to track renewals, ₹5,000 crore to electrification and ₹4,600 crore to gauge conversion.
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways was allocated just over ₹3.09 lakh crore for the year, about 8 per cent more than the ₹2.87 lakh crore provided in 2025-26, with the National Highways Authority of India's share rising to ₹1.87 lakh crore from ₹1.70 lakh crore and a further ₹35,027 crore available to it from the Permanent Bridge Fees Fund. On the ministry's own demand for grants, its capital spending has risen from ₹5,471 crore in 2012-13 to ₹2.94 lakh crore budgeted for the coming year.
Execution has held up better than the middle years of the decade suggested it would. NHAI built more than 5,300 km of national highway in 2025-26, roughly 15 per cent above its target of 4,640 km, and spent ₹2,44,362 crore against budget support of ₹2,38,384 crore, funding the difference of about ₹5,978 crore from its own resources. Fresh awards had fallen from around 12,000 km in 2022-23 to about 6,000 km in 2024-25, and were set back at 10,000 km for the year just ended.
For equipment and systems suppliers the important thing about those numbers is what they buy. India is the world's third-largest market for construction equipment, and the Indian Construction Equipment Manufacturers Association expects annual volumes to approach 250,000 units by the end of the decade, against a market that currently turns over a little under 140,000 machines a year. Earthmoving equipment accounts for around seven in ten of those units, which is the profile of a market building roads, rail formation and industrial sites rather than one replacing an existing fleet.
Rail signalling is the other opening. Kavach, the indigenous automatic train protection system, has to be fitted to locomotives and to trackside equipment across a network of more than 68,000 route kilometres, and the ₹1.2 lakh crore safety allocation is where that work is funded. Neither the onboard electronics nor the trackside installation is a market that existed at this scale five years ago.
The condition attached to all of it is local manufacture. India's large transport procurements are written to require production inside the country, which is why the Siemens order produced a locomotive works in Gujarat rather than a shipping schedule from Germany. Global suppliers get the revenue; India gets the plant, the supply chain and the maintenance base. Companies that treat the market as an export destination will find themselves outside the tender.
The first D9 is one locomotive out of 1,200. What it demonstrates is that the programme behind it is converting budget lines into delivered industrial hardware at a pace that the award numbers alone would not have predicted.