India: local-content preference margin in NH-328 Uttar Pradesh road tender (INR 351.25 crore)

Mechanism

The legal instrument is the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade's (DPIIT) Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) Order, 2017 (as amended, Order No. P-45021/2/2017-B.E.-II), which mandates a bid-evaluation preference margin (ordinarily a 20% purchase-preference margin over a 50% minimum local-content threshold) for "Class-I local supplier" bidders across central-government procurement, including MoRTH/NHAI national-highway contracts. This filing records one instance of that standing order applied to a specific tender: a MoRTH Request for Proposal (ref. CE-RO/LKO/NH(O)/11/NH-328/Civil Work/2022-23) for a road-construction contract on NH-328 in Uttar Pradesh state, valued by GTA at INR 351.25 crore, targeting firm-specific preferences in civil-engineering, general-construction, and engineering-services categories. GTA's MAST classification is "M: Government procurement restrictions," inward-affecting, with national-level implementation despite the state-level tender scope. GTA's underlying description, affected-sector detail, and affected-trading-partner list sit behind an account-gated view; the tender reference and contract value were confirmed from the public state-act summary page.

Severity is set low (2) and severity_basis: quant given the disclosed contract value (INR 351.25 crore / ~USD 39.5m), consistent with the companion NHAI/NHIDCL/MoRTH localisation-preference filings from the same GTA batch: this is a routine, standing domestic-preference policy applied within a single road-construction contract, not a new trade barrier. It shifts bid-evaluation weighting toward Class-I local suppliers without outright excluding foreign bidders.

Downstream implications

• Foreign civil-engineering, road-construction, and

engineering-services contractors bidding into this MoRTH Uttar Pradesh NH-328 tender face a structural scoring disadvantage relative to Class-I local suppliers, consistent with India's Atmanirbhar Bharat procurement posture.

• This is another instance of the large recurring class of GTA-logged

Indian NHAI/NHIDCL/MoRTH/state-PWD road tenders carrying the same Preference-to-Make-in-India margin (see also the Telangana, Maharashtra PIU Kolhapur, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand road filings) — individually low severity, but cumulatively indicative of how systematically India applies domestic preference across its national-highway construction pipeline.

Open questions

• Full tender scope (route/section, contract term) was not

independently confirmed — GTA's affected-sector and affected-partner detail sit behind an account-gated view. Confirm against MoRTH's e-procurement portal (ref. CE-RO/LKO/NH(O)/11/NH-328/Civil Work/2022-23) if higher precision is needed.

• Exact local-content percentage threshold applied to the Class-I

designation for this specific tender was not independently confirmed against the full RFP document.