Being an owner of various crushers, I believe it’s not very healthy segment as the demands cannot be met. When I talk about a crusher, it’s not a machine, it’s a plant. So it also involves a lot of other machinery and other expertise to run itself. When there’s a machine involved, there’s an operator. Here, you don’t have an operator, you have a whole team working day in and day out. So, when we get a lot of offers to provide plants on rent or lease, the issues that we face with their demands are such that we are very sceptical regarding that. First of all, there will be issues about operational efficiency. As owners of the plant, we would never be happy with the kind of operators they put on our plants.

Challenges in procuring a crushing plant

Of course, interest rates are high, but they are not at an all-time high. There have been interest rates higher than this before. It can go down even if funding is available at such a rate that the business is viable. It’s not that funding is not available or it’s expensive; it’s moderate right now. Our experience with the bank was very smooth and very comfortable. I don’t know how the factor worked, but yeah, definitely for me, it was very easy to procure financing, and I believe that track-mounted plants are still easier to get financed than modular or chassis-mounted plants because they can be moved easily.

Output v/s capacity in CND waste

There are issues in the market about the output versus the capacity. Whenever we get such leads, say 50,000 tonnes of output in a month, and they say, “You know, we would require a 150 or 200 TPS plant,” we are astonished as to whether they have experience of running a plant, because we never experienced a 150 TPH or a 200 TPH plant giving a 50,000-tonne output.
But in the last five to seven years, players have come to a point where they are processing construction and demolition waste and using it again on their own sites. So, it is saving around 40 to 45 percent of that cost in terms of availability, production, and transportation. It also helps them save time and hassle from having to check the legality of procuring aggregates. Because it’s all available on their site it, just like what happens in milling for roads, that same thing happens in CND waste for concrete. We can at least replace 30 to 35 percent of aggregates if there is a certain availability of concrete there. So, that is another advantage of CND that we can look forward to in the coming years. At least in the next five years, we will see its potential growth, after which we will be able to see, you know, what we are investing in and the returns we are generating from it.
Rachit Agarwal, Director, Rajat & Sons Pvt. Ltd.