Simplex Electricals

Simplex Electricals is a Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) and Industrial Class ‘A’ electrical contracting firm operating across Eastern India, with a 29-year track record working alongside Indian Railway and state utilities. The company’s core specialisation is trenchless technology — installing underground power cables, optical fibre cable, railway signalling cable, and HDPE or steel pipelines by drilling beneath the surface rather than digging it open.

That distinction matters for sustainability. Traditional open-cut trenching for underground utilities means digging up roads, agricultural land, riverbeds, or forest floor along the entire length of a route, disturbing topsoil, cutting through root systems, and leaving a surface scar that can take years to recover. Horizontal Directional Drilling instead bores a narrow underground path between a single entry and exit pit, threading the cable or pipe through without opening a continuous trench. For crossings under railway tracks, rivers, roads, or land where excavation is restricted or impractical, trenchless installation is often the only method that avoids large-scale surface disruption altogether — which is why utilities and railways increasingly specify it over open-cut methods.

Simplex Electricals has built its business around this lower-impact installation method. The company operates seven owned and leased HDD rigs and has completed more than 700 kilometres of HDD works and 1,100-plus kilometres of underground cabling across 75-plus utility crossings, with active operations spanning nine Indian states including Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, and West Bengal. One notable project involved converting overhead 11kV and 33kV power lines to underground cable over South Eastern Railway territory across Jharkhand, Odisha, and West Bengal — work that removes overhead infrastructure from railway corridors while avoiding the extensive digging that conventional undergrounding would otherwise require.

Services Offered

Beyond trenchless drilling, Simplex Electricals runs a dedicated electrical division handling LT and HT works up to 33kV, industrial power supply and distribution systems, and large-scale area and street lighting. Combined service lines include:

• Horizontal Directional Drilling for HDPE and steel pipeline installation
• Underground power cable laying, including route survey, excavation, cable pulling, and termination
• Overhead power line construction and conversion to underground cabling
• Telecom OFC and railway signalling cable laying
• HT termination kit installation, pole and gantry structure erection, and protection equipment fitting
• Transformer terminations for LT and HT systems up to 33kV
• Power supply, distribution systems, and area/street lighting works

The company holds ISO 9001:2015 certification and a Class ‘A’ Electrical Contractor licence, is compliant with RDSO standards for railway works, and is authorised for electrical systems up to 132kV. Its 180-person workforce includes crews trained specifically in HT termination, structure erection, and transformer commissioning — alongside the drilling teams that operate its HDD rig fleet.

Why It Matters for Sustainability

Utility infrastructure has to go somewhere, and undergrounding cables and pipelines is itself a positive step for landscape and safety compared to overhead lines. The way that undergrounding happens, however, carries its own environmental cost when done through open trenching — particularly across agricultural belts, riverbanks, and railway or forest land where restoring the surface afterwards is slow and imperfect. By specialising in trenchless methods, firms like Simplex Electricals reduce the land disturbance, tree removal, and habitat fragmentation that come with kilometres of continuous open trenching, while still delivering the underground utility capacity that power and telecom networks need. This is one of the less visible ways sustainable infrastructure gets built in India — not through a single green product, but through choosing a construction method that leaves a smaller physical footprint on the ground it passes through.

Simplex Electricals works primarily across Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, and West Bengal, serving Indian Railway zones, state electricity utilities, and industrial clients who need underground cable and pipeline infrastructure installed with minimal surface disruption.