Why doesn't India have a 60,000-tonne class heavy forging press?

The largest forging press operating in India presses with about 16,000 tonnes of force. The largest in the world, in China, presses with 80,000. That is not a gap of degree; it is a gap of category, and India has no indigenous plan to close it.

A forging press of this class squeezes a heated metal ingot into shape under immense force. The largest single-piece components a nation can make — nuclear reactor pressure vessels, aircraft-carrier and submarine parts, next-generation aero-engine discs — depend on having a press big enough to forge them in one heat. Only five nations own presses in the 60,000-tonne class: China, France, Japan, South Korea and Russia. France's Aubert & Duval runs closed-die presses from 20,000 up to 65,000 tonnes. China's 80,000-tonne die press, independently designed and built, weighs 22,000 tonnes itself and entered trial production in April 2013, forging aviation, aerospace, shipbuilding and nuclear components in a single stroke.

India's builders sit well below that ceiling, though not idle. Bharat Forge runs press lines from 1,600 to 16,000 tonnes at Pune — the country's largest operating press, and still under a quarter of the 60,000-tonne class. MM Forgings is installing a 16,500-tonne hot press, manufactured in Russia because India cannot build the machine itself, at ₹230 crore, with commissioning targeted for 2026. L&T's Special Steels and Heavy Forgings plant at Hazira, built as an NPCIL-L&T joint venture, pairs a steel melt shop for ingots up to 600 tonnes with an open-die press earlier reported at 9,000 tonnes (taking 300-tonne ingots), with 17,000-tonne capacity planned; it holds the ASME N-stamp accreditation and has supplied calandrias, end-shields and steam generators for nearly all of India's indigenously built PHWRs. On the aerospace side, MIDHANI operates a 2,000-tonne isothermal press — described as the world's second-highest — for near-net-shape aero-engine compressor discs, with open-die forging capped at 25 tonnes.

The most ambitious step under way is a study, not a machine. HAL's Request for Information for a 20,000-tonne isothermal forging press drew four bids — from Bharat Forge, Ramakrishna Forgings, MIDHANI and PTC Industries — and remains uncontracted. Even that milestone, which would place India among a select group of nations, is a third of the 60,000-tonne class.

The gap persists because the press is only the visible layer. Isothermal forging — holding die and workpiece at the same high temperature through the cycle — is what lets you shape titanium and nickel superalloys into turbine discs and rotors, and India has demonstrated it only at small scale. Ultra-large forgings need defect-free steel ingots of correspondingly massive size; India has demonstrated 600-tonne ingot casting but not routine production at the top end. Matching oversized, high-temperature dies remain an emerging capability. And the press machine itself sits on a foundational capability India does not have: heavy hydraulic press manufacturing. The MM Forgings press comes from Russia; France partnered on the Belgaum aerospace press. A nation that imports the machine cannot readily scale it.

What it would take is visible in the dependency chain rather than in a single procurement. Closing the gap means building the press-manufacturing capability at home, scaling ingot casting and remelting into the hundreds of tonnes reliably, and maturing isothermal forging and large die tooling from demonstration to production. Each is a hard, distinct climb. China built its 80,000-tonne press indigenously; France reached 65,000 tonnes. The distance from a 16,000-tonne operating base — or a proposed 20,000-tonne one — to the 60,000-tonne class is measured not in a decade of intent but in the layered capabilities that must exist beneath the press before the press is worth building.