The episode started as a harmless one. Global tunnelling machine builder Herrenknecht of Schwanau builds a number of the machines it will supply to India at its Chinese plant, which has been the market leader since the 1970s. They began to get stuck after the two countries had a sharp falling out over the Galwan issue in 2020. Not banned, but not announced as such either, but only delayed, then held for customs, in a fog of officialdom that eventually Indian officials decided was not accidental, and not political. The pattern was later bluntly explained by the German Ambassador to India, Philipp Ackermann, to reporters: Political considerations delayed the machines from leaving; sustained diplomatic pressure up to the level of the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of External Affairs was responsible for the movement of the machines. The first pair of Mixshield machines, more than a year late, is now being delivered at Jawaharlal Nehru Port, more than a metre over 13 metres in diameter, the largest ever machines to be deployed on Indian soil, for the underground segment of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train corridor.

This is not a shipping story, though, because of how much exposure this showed. In the second phase of metro expansion in Chennai, about 23 machines were required, and Chinese-owned supply was a significant part of that order book until refurbishing units started picking up the order load in Tamil Nadu. The same issues were plaguing Mumbai's coastal and metro initiatives. The price of each unit is in excess of eighty crore rupees and it cannot be made in a matter of hours or days, generally arriving in a disassembled form that necessitates special logistical arrangements something that, as far as is known, only a few countries are able to provide at any level. India, with one of the world's most ambitious infrastructure programmes, which encompassed bullet trains, metro networks, highway tunnels and hydropower corridors, had given a single foreign authority the authority to give or withhold approval for its projects.

The answer is educational, and much needed. State-owned BEML, which is well known for manufacturing defence equipment and mining machinery, has issued tenders for design consultancy services for the development of tunnelling machines locally, and has held preliminary discussions with firms in Austria and Japan, and is looking at a pilot project of six and a half metres to be built with firms from Delhi Metro. Reading the geopolitical writing on the wall, however, Herrenknecht itself launched production in India, instead of sending everything through China, thereby signaling that the day of relying on one supplier, whether it's the likes of America, energy sources from Russia, or factories from China, is over. Already, Chennai Metro Rail has relied on domestically manufactured versions for most of the Phase II fleet, which is no flashy but crucial indicator of India's industrial backbone, not being as fragile as the fear implied.

This is part of a trend, not an exception. Today, the same fear is driving India's rare earth magnets policy, in which China supplied anywhere between eighty and ninety per cent of the imports until last year, and which has allocated dedicated processing corridors in Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, with approximately seven thousand crore rupees worth of incentives. Companies such as Vedanta, JSW and Sona BLW have made their presence felt in the production-linked incentive scheme, following the same strategy that propelled India from being a dull player to a viable competitor for mobile assembly and semiconductor packaging operations in just a few years. It's intentional TBMs and rare earth magnets have become two sides of the same coin India is the source of raw material and has the demand to justify domestic manufacturing of them, but yet it remains reliant on Chinese-made processing and manufacturing equipment to create something useful out of either.

None of this is an end to Indian trade with China.None of this is an end to Indian trade with China, that is not the game. The two economies are still very much interdependent, and a complete separation of them, in view of their size, is not a feasible nor an economical measure. The appetite for concentration risk is what is changing, not the appetite for risk.It is an appetite for concentration risk that is changing, not an appetite for risk. It is not a project of diversification to German, Japanese and local suppliers, it's more like a late insurance premium, when the premiums have increased. The very logic of China's own economy could end up working to this end as Beijing's heavy industry sector becomes over-capacity, Chinese companies are increasingly seeking export markets, giving India some leverage as it hedges its bets.

This is a wider point that lies just below the surface: A nation working on making bridges, tunnels and rail tracks at India's rate cannot afford to have strategic weak points in machines that don't make the news until they aren't arriving. It's not about tunnelling, it's about the TBM saga. It was a test that India didn't want to take and one it seems now is not willing to fail at again.