THE RISE OF FORENSIC PROCUREMENT

India's mega-projects are exposing the limits of price-led purchasing. A new procurement discipline, rooted in data, diagnostics, and durability, is quietly reshaping project outcomes from the ground up.

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The foundation of project execution is quietly but drastically changing as India moves closer to its 2030 infrastructure targets.

High-precision engineering services are replacing procurement as a purely transactional activity with an emphasis on unit prices and delivery schedules. A sophisticated "forensic" strategy is replacing the old "purchasing" perspective in the high-stakes contexts of mega-projects. This change involves integrating data, field experience, and lifetime performance into the very first stage of the project lifecycle, rather than just selecting better materials.

The way the mining and material processing industry is reacting to the enormous demand for premium aggregates reflects this change. The business has reached a crucial turning point with the prohibition of river sand mining in various Indian states. The use of high-performance screening media is largely driven by the growth of manufactured sand, according to Anubhav Chandra, National Sales Manager at Ashar Locker India Pvt. Ltd. However, the problem with produced sand is that conventional screening methods are essentially useless. According to Chandra, the industry must transition from being transactional vendors to becoming engineering service providers. He notes that "informed and mature clients now evaluate cost on a cost-per-ton basis over the long term, rather than an upfront unit price." This shift is motivated by the awareness that boosting efficiency costs a fraction of the cost of investing in new capital equipment. By conducting mechanical and electrical audits of the entire crusher circuit, procurement executives may uncover hidden inefficiencies, such as recirculation overloads and missing level sensors, that would otherwise go undiscovered in siloed operations.