Cummins Confidential : EXCON 2025 - Diesel Cosplay For A Green Tomorrow

Cummins India rocks up at South Asia’s biggest construction kit circus to announce it has, heroically, met the law.

EXCON: Diesel Disneyland

Bengaluru this week is EXCON 2025, South Asia’s giant playground for anything big, loud and fossil fuelled. Perfect stage for Cummins India to arrive with its “next generation power portfolio” and a straight face.

Front of house: an 82.5 kVA CPCB IV+ compliant genset, posed like it just cured asthma. Behind it: the usual line up of diesel engines, a hydrogen engine that still sets air on fire, and an aftertreatment box to catch whatever gets past the brochure.

This is the trick. Put a “future ready” banner over a hall full of combustion hardware and call it a sustainability story.

Clean Enough For CPCB, Dirty Enough For Reality

The star of the release is the CPCB IV+ compliant 82.5 kVA genset. IV+ is not a spa package. It is the latest Indian legal minimum for generator emissions. You do not get bonus points for it. You get to avoid being illegal.

The text sells it as “smarter” and “cleaner” and “future ready”. What it quietly means is “less filthy than the older ones we sold you by the thousand”. The product blurb even reminds you the portfolio was launched in 2023, which happens to be when IV+ became mandatory for new diesel generators.

So the big reveal at EXCON 2025 is that Cummins has designed a better box to sit under a law that has already been in force for over two years. Imagine announcing “Next generation seatbelts” in 2025 and forgetting to mention they are just the ones you are legally required to fit.

Quick Commerce, Slow Breath

Target applications: quick commerce, infrastructure, construction, mining, “critical commercial establishments”. So your ten minute grocery delivery, your luxury tower construction and your pit mine all get their own personal micro power station belching a legally acceptable cocktail of NOx and particulates next to where people live and work.

Diesel generator sets are notorious for local pollution. Stick them on rooftops, in basements and beside site cabins, and you do not need a global climate model to see who breathes the output. But in Cummins language this becomes “reliable and efficient power” and “enhancing productivity”.

When the lights flicker because the grid is struggling, people get generators. When people get generators, they get diesel fumes. When they get diesel fumes, they get a Cummins press release about innovation.

Meet The Family: Same Movie, Different Poster

The product fact sheet reads like a family WhatsApp chat from House Combustion.

QSB4.5 mid range diesel for excavators and loaders, flogged as “best in class fuel economy”.
L10 ten litre “fuel agnostic” platform, because nothing says decarbonisation like an engine designed to keep burning whatever liquid or gaseous fossil you put in it.
M15 fifteen litre high horsepower lump for mining trucks and giant compressors, proudly marketed for “power and durability in extreme conditions”, also known as “we designed it to keep going until the planet taps out”.

Every engine is “proven”, “reliable”, “high uptime”. No mention of the externalities. No mention of who lives downwind of the dump trucks and compressors these things will run in for the next fifteen years.

“Fuel agnostic” here does not mean “we do not care about fossil fuel”. It means “bring us any fossil fuel, we will turn it into noise and emissions”.

Hydrogen, But Still On Fire

To prove it has seen a climate report, Cummins throws in the B6.7H hydrogen internal combustion engine. The copy leans heavily on “zero carbon emissions” and “diesel like performance”. The word “combustion” stays right there in the middle like a warning label nobody in marketing can read.

Hydrogen in a fuel cell can be close to zero emission in use. Hydrogen in an internal combustion engine still produces NOx because you are still burning something in air. You still need an aftertreatment system. You still get the same engineering logic: set fire to fuel, catch whatever comes out in a clever can, call it sustainable.

So the “transition to low carbon mobility” on offer is not a shift away from combustion. It is a shift to new ways of selling combustion as fresh and green.

Aftertreatment: Fancy Word For Filter

The 9 inch Single Module aftertreatment system is the backstage crew. Up to 70 percent smaller, 40 percent lighter, over 99 percent particulate removal, heavily localised content, “Made in India”.

Tucked inside that spec sheet is the admission you are never meant to notice: you only need an aftertreatment system if what comes out of the engine is bad enough that regulators force you to bolt a filter and chemistry lab to the exhaust.

In plain language:

Design engine that creates harmful gases and particles.
Design expensive kit to scrub some of them out.
Call the combination an “advanced emission solution”.

If the underlying answer was clean, EXCON would be full of grid connections, storage, and kit designed around not burning fuel at all. Instead we get a hall of metal trying to out filter itself.

Six Decades Of Being “Integral”

The quote from Cummins India leadership hits every cliché in one breath.

“Backbone of progress”
“Propelling the sector”
“Made in India for India and the world”
“Integral partner in powering India’s progress for over 60 years”

What it never says is that the same six decades of “powering progress” have helped lock India’s construction and infrastructure model into diesel dependence so deep that the fix is now a trade fair of ever more baroque engines and aftertreatment boxes.

EXCON is where that dependence gets dressed up as “accelerating growth” and “building tomorrow”. Cummins is there to make sure tomorrow still runs on compression ignition.

Future Ready For Yesterday

The release closes by talking about “future ready power solutions” for a “fast growing industrial ecosystem”.

Future ready for what, exactly.

For a grid that never catches up, so every mall and mine needs its own backup stack.
For air quality laws that inch forward while hardware races to keep just inside the line.
For a climate that gets hotter and wilder while the response is to bolt a hydrogen label on the same basic machine and hope nobody reads past the heading.

If this is the “next generation power portfolio”, the next generation should probably bring masks.

Sources