In today's story, we look at a small Ghaziabad company that builds sewer suckers, road sweepers and smog guns for India's cities — and is now getting ready for an SME IPO.
Picture a Delhi-NCR morning in November. The sky is grey, the AQI is scary, and somewhere on a flyover a truck is spraying a fine mist of water into the air.
That truck is an anti-smog gun. And someone had to build it.
Quite often, that someone is a company you've probably never heard of: Quality Enviro Engineers Limited. It turned ₹63 crore of revenue into ₹5 crore of profit last year, mostly by selling cleaning machines to municipal corporations.
So let's dig in. Pun intended.
Quality Enviro Engineers was born on May 6, 2016, in Sahibabad, Ghaziabad. Its pitch is simple: if a city needs to clean something, QEE wants to sell the machine that does it.
The product list reads like a municipal shopping catalogue. There are dustbins at ₹2,200 apiece. There are tractor-mounted sewer suction machines at ₹8.5 lakh. And at the top end, there are truck-mounted road sweepers at ₹50 lakh and sewer suction-cum-jetting machines at ₹48 lakh.
In between sit anti-smog guns, sky lifts, water tankers, dumper placers, refuse compactors, electric garbage tippers and, yes, animal catcher vehicles.
All of this fits into three buckets: solid waste, liquid waste and air pollution.
Where does it get made? At two units in Ghaziabad covering about 6,000 sq. metres. Plant 1 can make around 100 machines and Plant 2 around 200.
Here's the interesting bit though. This is a light business. QEE's entire fixed asset base is just about ₹4 crore — and more than half of that is a ₹2.55 crore building it finished in FY26. So QEE isn't a heavy-metal factory giant. It's closer to a fabricator-assembler that bolts custom bodies onto truck and tractor chassis.
Mostly by winning government tenders.
QEE's customers are nagar nigams and urban local bodies. And you can see the tender life all over its balance sheet: ₹1.3 crore parked as earnest money deposits, ₹1 crore as security deposits and ₹2.4 crore of bank guarantees. One of its disclosed customers is Kanpur Nagar Nigam. Every rupee of revenue comes from India.
Now, the money comes in through three doors:
Revenue (₹ crore) | FY25 | FY26 |
|---|---|---|
| Machines it makes | 39.9 | 31.6 |
| Goods it trades | 1.1 | 8.6 |
| Services | 10.3 | 22.8 |
| Rental | 0.2 | — |
| Total | 51.5 | 63.0 |
Notice something odd? Sales of its own machines actually fell 21% in FY26. The growth came from services, which more than doubled, and from trading.
Services now make up about 36% of revenue. Think of it this way: instead of just selling a city a sweeper, QEE increasingly gets paid to run and maintain it too. That's stickier, repeat money — and a very different business from one-off machine sales.
This is very much a family business.
Ashwani Srivastava is the Chairman and Managing Director, with over 20 years of experience. He owns 36.04% of the company. Neha Srivastava, listed as his relative, owns another 36.04%. She left the board in July 2023 but is still a promoter. Put together, the family controls about 72%.
Two long-time lieutenants complete the core team. Rajiv Kumar heads production and Devendra Singh heads marketing.
But here's where it gets interesting. Look at what happened in 2026:
May 14: a Company Secretary was appointed
A CFO, Amit Kumar Gupta, came on board
Aug 14: three independent directors joined, and Rajiv and Devendra became Whole Time Directors
The company dropped "Private" from its name and raised authorised capital from ₹5 crore to ₹18 crore
If you've followed IPOs, you know this checklist. It's what a company does right before it knocks on the stock exchange's door. And sure enough, the annual report says QEE is preparing to file for an SME IPO. It has already set aside ₹10 lakh of IPO expenses.
QEE hasn't raised much outside capital. There have been four small private placements:
Date | Amount raised | Price per share |
|---|---|---|
| May 2024 | ₹13 crore | ₹551.20 |
| Apr 2024 | ₹0.77 crore | ₹82.50 |
| Dec 2022 | ₹0.6 crore | ₹10 |
| Dec 2020 | ₹0.2 crore | ₹10 |
The big one was May 2024, which brought in ₹13 crore for working capital and general business needs. The April 2024 allotment of 93,400 shares lines up exactly with the stake of Puneet Singh Marwah, the only outsider holding more than 5% (7.92%).
But pause on those two 2024 rows. In just about five weeks, the issue price jumped from ₹82.50 to ₹551.20. That's a 6.7x markup with no big change in the business in between. Worth remembering when someone quotes you "the last round price".
Then, in September 2026, QEE did a 10:1 bonus issue. Shareholders got 10 free shares for every one they held, and the share count went from about 11.8 lakh to 1.3 crore. Nothing about the company's value changed. The pizza just got cut into more slices.
Profits have grown much faster than sales. Here's the four-year picture:
₹ crore | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 | FY26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 49.9 | 40.2 | 51.5 | 63.0 |
| EBITDA | 4.7 | 5.0 | 6.0 | 6.7 |
| Net profit | 2.6 | 2.9 | 3.9 | 5.0 |
Revenue grew only about 8% a year over three years, and even dipped 19% in FY24. But net profit nearly doubled, compounding at roughly 25% a year. In FY26 alone, revenue rose 22% and profit 28%.
Sounds great, right? Well, there's a catch. Actually, two.
Catch #1: Not all profit is operating profit. FY26 "other income" was ₹1.76 crore. Of that, ₹70 lakh came from "balances written back" — basically old dues the company decided it no longer owes. That's a one-time boost, not a repeatable one.
Catch #2: Profit isn't cash. QEE's cash flow from operations was negative in both years: minus ₹8.8 crore in FY25 and minus ₹1.7 crore in FY26.
Where did the cash go? Into two places. Inventory ballooned from ₹1.1 crore to ₹14.4 crore, mostly half-built machines. And customers owe it ₹33.6 crore, more than half a year's sales. Governments pay, but they pay slowly. To bridge the gap, QEE leaned on an HDFC overdraft that grew to ₹11.2 crore.
This is how most government contractors live. But it means QEE's real test isn't winning orders. It's collecting on them.
In the unlisted market, QEE is being valued at roughly ₹119 crore. That's based on an indicative price of about ₹92 per share (as of September 2026) on around 1.3 crore shares.
That works out to about 24 times last year's profit (P/E of 23.7) and 3.65 times its book value.
Now let's compare it with the May 2024 round. Remember the bonus issue? ₹92 today equals about ₹1,012 in pre-bonus terms. The May 2024 round at ₹551.20 valued QEE at about ₹65 crore. So the unlisted valuation has grown roughly 1.8x in a little over two years.
Is that expensive? It depends on how you look at it. A P/E in the mid-20s isn't cheap for a small company that lives on tenders and burns operating cash. On the other hand, profits are growing at about 25% a year, so the multiple shrinks fast if that pace holds.
One more thing. Unlisted prices are indicative. Very few shares actually trade. The final IPO price could look quite different.
QEE's real customer is government policy. And right now, policy is pushing hard in its direction.
1. Swachh Bharat 2.0. The government set aside ₹1,41,600 crore for Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) 2.0, covering 2021-22 to 2025-26. That's more than 2.5x the previous phase. The goal is "garbage-free cities", which means door-to-door collection, segregation, processing and clearing old dumpsites. Every one of those needs machines.
One caveat though. SBM-U 2.0 formally runs until October 1, 2026. What replaces it, and with how much money, is the big open question for the whole sector.
2. Machines instead of humans in sewers. Manual scavenging is banned, and the government is paying to replace it. Under SBM-U 2.0, ₹371 crore went to 26 states and UTs to buy 2,585 desludging vehicles . The NAMASTE scheme adds a capital subsidy of up to ₹5 lakh for sanitation workers to buy mechanised cleaning vehicles. Sewer suction and jetting machines are right in QEE's sweet spot.
3. North India can't breathe. The National Clean Air Programme covers 131 non-attainment cities, including Ghaziabad, Noida, Meerut and Faridabad. That's literally QEE's backyard. And cities have spent most NCAP money on dust control. About 63.68% went into things like road paving, mechanical sweepers and water sprinklers. CPCB has also told large construction sites (above 20,000 sq. metres) to deploy anti-smog guns.
4. Cities prefer to rent, not buy. More municipalities now hire machines with operators instead of owning them. New Delhi's NDMC, for instance, hired anti-smog guns for ₹2.87 crore over two years, with a driver, operator and helper for each. QEE's jump in service revenue suggests it's leaning right into this shift.
Before you get too excited, a few things in the annual report deserve a second read:
A ₹83 lakh dispute with Kanpur Nagar Nigam for sewer jetting machines, unpaid for over three years and now in mediation. No provision has been made for it.
Old unpaid GST demands going back to 2018, plus several GST appeals pending before tribunals and the Patna High Court.
A related entity, Green India Envoiro & Infrastructure, which buys from and sells to QEE and supplied ₹2.56 crore of construction work in FY25.
₹7.7 crore routed through the MD's personal account in FY26 — received and repaid within the year, but unusual for a company heading to an IPO.
Heavy dependence on short-term bank borrowing to fund slow government payments.
QEE is a small company sitting on a big, policy-backed theme. Cleaner cities, mechanised sewers and dust control aren't going away, especially in Delhi-NCR.
The profit growth is real. But so is the cash crunch that comes with government customers. What happens after Swachh Bharat 2.0 ends, and whether QEE can turn its growing order book into cash, will decide whether this IPO is a clean win or a messy one.
Until then...
Disclaimer: This story is for information only and isn't investment advice. Unlisted shares are risky, illiquid and hard to value. Do your own research or speak to a SEBI-registered adviser.