Sanjay Verma takes an in-depth look at what five decades in MEWPs taught us — and why the next chapter is Green!
“The green transition will accelerate faster than most current projections assume, as green-certified construction and foreign-invested industrial projects drive electrification as a procurement prerequisite.”
Sanjay Verma, Group CEO, Mtandt Rentals Limited.
When Mtandt entered the MEWP
business in 1995, India’s construction sites ran on bamboo scaffolding, manual
ladders, and a workforce that balanced precariously on makeshift platforms.
Safety at height was largely an afterthought.
Our primary task in those early
years was not to grow a business — it was to prove a concept: that a powered
aerial platform was a sound, reliable alternative to traditional access
methods.
Fifty years on, that proof has
been delivered many thousands of times over. But, what we have accumulated is
not merely a track record — it is a living body of knowledge:
-
How Indian worksites operate in the monsoon.
-
How a supervisor on a Chennai refinery turnaround
thinks differently from one on a Delhi metro corridor.
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How every one of those differences matters when a
technician is working twenty metres above the ground.
This is knowledge that cannot be
reverse-engineered from a product catalogue. It must be earned, project by
project, across decades.
The
irreplaceable value of ‘First Time Right’
In the MEWP rental business, the
cost of a breakdown at height is never just the repair bill; it is the stopped
production line, the delayed milestone, and, in worst cases, the safety
incident that follows. Reliability is not a feature. It is the product itself.
What ‘First Time Right’ means in
practice is that a machine is pre-inspected against a checklist refined over
decades, by a ‘certified operator’ and not merely a trained one; a service team
that knows the failure patterns of every platform in our fleet because they
have seen and fixed those failures themselves.
A new entrant can purchase the
same machines we operate. They cannot purchase this knowledge. In the EPC
sector, where at-height work sits on the critical path of every major
commissioning job, that distinction is the difference between a project
delivered on time and one that is not.
The
Green Inflection: Sustainability as Commercial Logic
Every major transition in our
industry has arrived with a certain inevitability — and the shift from
diesel-heavy to electric and hybrid MEWPs is the most significant the sector
has seen. The driver is not just regulatory pressure. It is commercial logic.
India’s largest industrial
clients are operating under ESG commitments that extend into their supply
chains. When a world-class chemical plant reports Scope 3 emissions to global
investors, the diesel fumes from a boom lift on their facility floor are no
longer invisible. They are a line item in a sustainability report — and they
need to come down.
The value-for-money equation has
been rewritten. Electric MEWPs eliminate fuel costs, reduce noise (enabling
operations in occupied and indoor environments), lower combustion risk in
flammable settings, and deliver measurably better air quality. Our analysis of
long-duration deployments consistently shows electric platforms reach lower
total cost of ownership beyond four weeks — a reality reshaping how procurement
teams write tenders.
At Mtandt, we began
transitioning toward electric and hybrid fleets in anticipation of client
mandates, not in response to them. That is precisely what fifty years in this
business teaches you — to read the direction of change before it becomes an
ultimatum.
The
Next Decade: What we see from here
India’s infrastructure pipeline
— ports, high-speed rail, renewable energy, smart cities — will drive MEWP
demand that is not incremental but transformational. Tightening compliance
standards will accelerate the exit of informal, low-cost operators who cannot
meet certification requirements.
Telematics and predictive
maintenance are moving fleet management from reactive to proactive. And, the
green transition will accelerate faster than most current projections assume, as
green-certified construction and foreign-invested industrial projects drive
electrification as a procurement prerequisite.
The companies that lead these
transitions will define the standards everyone else follows. Those that wait
will compete on price alone — a race that experience has consistently shown
leads nowhere productive.
Legacy
is not nostalgia — It is competitive advantage
We helped build India’s
industrial skyline from above. The shift to green fleets is not a departure
from that mission — it is the natural expression of it. We are not adopting
electric MEWPs because the market has demanded it today. We are adopting them
because the market will demand it tomorrow, and because the right time to lead
a transition is before it becomes inevitable.
For the last fifty years, we
have helped build India’s industrial skyline. Over the next fifty, we intend to
help build a cleaner one.
For more information visit: www.mtandt.com