Imagine that India could construct world-class factories, warehouses and airports twice as quickly and at 20th the cost with no reduction in quality or sustainability. It is not a futuristic vision anymore, but it is being done now with Pre-Engineered Buildings. The PEBs have become the engines of the infrastructure revolution in India now. Built in factories, assembled on site and made to last decades.
What Are PEBs?
Pre-Engineered Buildings (PEBs) are new steel buildings that have the most important elements, including columns, rafters, and roof frames, which are created and assembled in the production plant and sent to the construction location. You can imagine it as the transition between the old-fashioned method of construction, where all elements are assembled on-site, one after another, to a smarter, more expeditious, and accurate one, similar to the way an IKEA product is assembled.
What is making PEBs win over the RCC (traditional construction)?
The Indian construction industry is quietly revolutionising its construction industry, and Pre-Engineered Buildings (PEBs) are the centre of this revolution. PEBs are associated with a plethora of benefits as compared to the traditional Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) structures in the areas of cost, speed, quality, and even sustainability.
PEBs also hugely reduce the cost of projects through the reduction of on-site overheads like labour and material handling. Most of the components are manufactured in the factories under controlled conditions, thus processes are standardized to achieve consistency in quality, and many of the inefficiencies that hinder traditional construction are eliminated.
The use of traditional RCC construction relies heavily on labour availability and the skills of the on-site workers. In the current situation of the lack of qualified employees, it is easy to lose the quality and schedule. PEBs manage to overcome this by moving the majority of the work to modern production plants, where precision engineering and automated processes provide the same quality and tighter tolerances that give structures that are both durable and reliable, with less reliance on manual site work.
PEBs are in line with the increased attention paid to sustainable development. Given that the major part of the building is prefabricated elsewhere, noise and dust decrease, and disturbances at the construction site also decrease. Moreover, PEBs are recoverable and encourage a circular construction economy because of the steel material and hence are a greener option to modern infrastructure.
The process of Design and Construction of PEBs
The entire smooth steel-framed building is a well-orchestrated process behind. This is done in three main steps, namely Design, Fabrication and Assembly. The Design Phase is the base phase of the whole project. It entails site evaluation, finalisation of design requirements and obtaining approvals. This guarantees precision, efficient utilisation of steel and good relations between the engineering groups and on-the-ground contractors.
Fabrication Phase- In this stage, the steelwork (Columns, rafters and trusses) is carefully designed and produced in controlled factory settings. Meanwhile, the work on the substructure (such as foundations) starts at the project site. This parallel way of working makes the project schedules shorter and yet quality-assured.
The Assembly and Installation Phase entails the need to carry the prefabricated parts to the construction site to assemble them. Similar to assembling a large, custom-designed kit, these parts are assembled by bolt and fasteners, resulting in structural stability and accuracy of the design, and an assembly time that is only a fraction of that needed in a conventional RCC assembly, without affecting the structural integrity or the expected service life.
Introduction to Pre-Engineered Buildings (PEB) Market in India
Pre-Engineered Buildings (PEB) is an Indian industry that has experienced a consistent and strong growth in recent years due to the increasing industrialisation, growth in infrastructure, and a general shift towards efficient and fast construction technologies. PEBs are widely applied in automotive, in FMCG, in e-commerce, in third-party logistics (3PL), in railway depots, in maintenance facilities and institutional (schools, hospitals, auditoriums, and community buildings) sectors.
The industry has been growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 8.3% between fiscal 2019 and 2025, increasing to 210 billion by FY2025, which is more than 130 billion in fiscal 2019. In the future, the market is estimated to increase at a CAGR of 9.5-10.5 between FY2025 and FY2030 to an estimated 330-345 billion, with the industrial and infrastructure segments being the major drivers.
Rising Global Presence and Momentum of Exports
The United States became the biggest destination of Indian PEBs in the FY2025 with an export value of 50.4 billion. UAE (₹3.5 billion) and Saudi Arabia (₹2.5 billion) came next, and the three leading markets made nearly 62 per cent of the total PEB exports in India. This continuous increase in exports from FY2019 to FY2025 reflects the increasing competitive position of India in the world regarding PEB manufacturing, higher production capacities, and compliance with global quality standards.
Minor Penetration into the Building Sector: In fiscal 2025, building sector penetration was still at a low level of 0–1%, in comparison to its penetration in the industrial (1315) and infrastructure (57) segments. This implies that there is a huge growth potential with the developers, architects, and end-users becoming more aware of the benefits of PEBs.
Shift from RCC to PEB: A Sustainable Transition: PEBs are easily deconstructible and constructible to make the steel components reusable or recyclable at the end of the lifecycle. This cyclic design can lead to a big reduction of the waste and dependency on landfills in construction, and PEBs become a part and parcel of the green building movement in India.
Government Push in Innovative and Affordable Construction: Government projects such as the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) and its Light House Projects (LHPs) are now taking the centre stage in catalysing the acceptance of prefabricated and pre-engineered technologies, especially in the affordable category. As the central and state governments continue to pay greater attention to affordable and fast-constructed housing, the need for cold-formed and light steel structures will only continue increasing.
Warehousing and Cold Storage Expansion: The outbreak of e-commerce, third-party logistics, and organised retailing has led to massive investments in the warehousing and cold storage facilities. PEBs are favourable to the developers and logistics players because they are economical, less labour-intensive, and the construction cycles are short. With the expansion of the warehousing capacity in major logistics centres and the tier-II cities, the PEBs will become the standard option to construct these facilities.
Key Challenges in the PEB Industry
Although this industry is in a growth trend, Pre-Engineered Buildings (PEB) in India is experiencing a number of structural and operational issues that may affect its scalability, profitability, and sustainability in the long run.
Exposure to the Fluctuations in Prices of Raw Materials: The industry has a few suppliers of high-quality steel with a large bargaining power. Additionally, the steel prices are very sensitive to the global economic and geopolitical trends, where strategic procurement and inventory management are important to enable the manufacturers of the PEB to remain cost-stable.
Transportation and Logistics Problems: PEB parts are produced elsewhere and then delivered to the construction site, which is why logistics are of great importance during the project implementation. The cost of transportation is a distance-based and complexity-based cost that may constitute a substantial schedule of a project. Moreover, the danger of damage to components in transit or handling may lead to rework, cost overruns and delays in schedule.
Industry Fragmentation: The PE industry enjoys a moderate capital requirement, and this has been instrumental in attracting a high number of small and regional players into the industry, hence creating a highly fragmented competitive environment in the industry. The smaller and unorganised players occasionally make trade-offs in quality and engineering to be cost-competitive, and this casts doubt on the structural integrity and reliability of the buildings they produce in the long term.
Low Awareness and Unskilled Manpower: Although there is an increased acceptance, the PEB technology in India remains in its initial stages as compared to the developed economies. There is also a shortage of trained professionals and specialists in design who can be involved in the industry because of the lack of knowledge of modular and pre-engineered construction techniques. To address this gap in skills, it will be necessary to expand technical training, dissemination of knowledge and industry-academia alliances to generate the full potential of pre-engineered construction in India.
Conclusion
PEBs are not merely an invention in engineering symbolising the transformation of India towards efficiency, ambitions and towards being a global player. The only question left to ask: If this is what is in store for the future of construction, when will the future become the reality?