The Heaviest Haul: New Locomotives Are Putting This Indian State On The Fast Track
The Indian town of Marhaura isn’t on many tourist destination lists.
Located on the western edge of Bihar, one of the country’s most densely populated and least developed states, the town has an economy that’s based largely on harvesting mangos, bananas and sugar cane from plantations that fade out into a curtain of pale haze that never quite lifts. Just over 60 percent know how to read. “Bihar happens to be one of the least industrialized areas in India,” says Nalin Jain, the CEO of GE’s Transportation and Aviation businesses in the country.
Yet Jain is building a high-tech “brilliant factory” on the edge of town designed to produce a fleet of new locomotives for Indian Railways. It’s a heavy haul. The project involves moving a mountain of earth to raise the 67-acre lot where the plant will stand by 9 feet — the area is prone to flooding — but also installing basic infrastructure such as bathrooms for girls in local schools so that they can attend class and apply for jobs. “We aren’t building a factory on an island,” he says, “we are creating a whole ecosystem that will lift the economy in that state.”
Last year, Indian Railways (IR) awarded GE Transportation a contract to build 1,000 new diesel-electric locomotives. These next-generation machines will start the process of upgrading the IR’s 5,000 older engines — mostly from the 1970s and 1980s — that currently haul freight over its railroad network. The state-run railroad operator, which holds a 26 percent stake in the joint venture, had already had Marhaura in mind. It typically opens new factories in underserved parts of the country. For example, GE also is building a maintenance shop for the new locomotives in Roza, Uttar Pradesh, a town in another populous state racing to catch up to the rest of the country. France’s Alstom, which won a large contract from IR for electric locomotives at the same time as GE, is building in Bihar. “They want these contracts to be catalysts for economic development,” Jain says.
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