The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Manpower shortage hits automobile industry

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Manpower shortage hits automobile industry

By Our Staff Reporter

VELLORE, MAY 10. While the automotive industry, incorporating the latest technology, has made tremendous progress in India in the past 10 years, the industry is facing an acute shortage of qualified technical manpower, according to Balraj Bhanot, Director, Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI), Pune.

Mr.Bhanot who was here to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Vellore Institute of Technology yesterday told newspersons on the VIT campus that India was today recognised as a country with the biggest potential in the automotive industry in Asia.

The country is way ahead of other countries including Japan in the harmonisation of standards for the industry. While there were 14 international standards for the industry, India had already achieved 50 per cent harmonisation of standards, and had set a road map to reach 100 per cent by the end of the decade. ``We have tight standards in the two-wheeler industry''. India would also be playing a leading role even in automotive electronics, with most of the required software being made in Bangalore.

Ignition technology, vehicle designs and development, noise, vibration and harshness (NVH), engine design and development, emission testing and control, safety regulations and alternative fuels were some of the areas in which the ARAI was specialising.

The ARAI director said, the automotive industry in India had reached a stage where the annual turnover was about Rs.100,000 crores. ``But the main problem was that we do not have sufficient number of colleges offering postgraduate and Ph.D. programmes in automotive engineering''. He hoped that the gap in manpower availability would be bridged through the MoU that the ARAI has signed with the VIT. More such joint ventures with technical educational institutions in this sphere were required to meet the future needs of the industry, he said.

The ARAI, formed jointly by the Indian automotive industries and the Ministry of Industry, Government of India is the only organisation authorised to test and certify the road-worthiness of all automotive vehicle models, manufactured indigenously as well as imported into India. Since all new model vehicles had to be taken to Pune for certification, the Government of India has decided to establish two more testing centres, one each in Delhi and Chennai at an investment of about Rs.400 crores each initially, in order to decentralise the certification process. It has prepared a master plan for Rs.1800 crores to buy testing equipments and create testing facilities in the existing as well as the new centres.

The VIT Chancellor, G. Viswanathan, who along with Mr.Bhanot signed the 4-year MoU said that as per the agreement, the two institutions would be jointly offering a two-year Master of Technology (M.Tech) programme in automotive Engineering, which is specially designed to meet the needs of modern automotive industry. Fifteen students, mostly sponsored by the industry, would be admitted in the first year course for 2004-05. He said that under this `twinning programme', while the students would be studying in VIT during the first two semesters, and spend the remaining two semesters at ARAI, Pune. Though the programme is mainly meant for industry-sponsored candidates, candidates qualified in the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and self-financing non-GATE candidates will also be admitted, depending upon the vacancies.

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