India: local-content preference margin in MoRTH Tamil Nadu flyover RFP (INR 116.78cr)

Mechanism

The legal instrument is the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade's Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) Order, 2017 (as amended), which mandates a minimum local-content threshold and price-preference margin for "Class-I local supplier" bids on eligible public-procurement contracts. MoRTH applied this standing order to a specific Tamil Nadu flyover RFP (TN.No.25/HDO/NH/2025-26/, INR 116.78 crore) rather than issuing a new bespoke instrument — the order is the generic policy; this filing records one of its many individual applications.

Severity is set at 1 (quant, anchored on the INR 116.78cr / ~USD 13.6m contract value) reflecting a routine, generic-order application to a small regional infrastructure tender, not a sector-wide or strategic-materials-targeted measure.

Downstream implications

• One of a large, recurring series of MoRTH/NHAI regional road and

flyover tenders applying the same 2017 Make-in-India preference order; individually low-impact but cumulatively signals the depth of India's domestic-content preference regime across civil-works procurement.

• No identified nexus to critical materials or foreign suppliers

beyond the standing local-content threshold.

Open questions

• Exact local-content percentage margin and any exemption thresholds

for this specific tender were not visible in GTA's public excerpt (full terms are account-gated).