The Hindu : Kerala News : BEL unit to provide waterfront support

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Monday, Dec 08, 2008
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Kerala

BEL unit to provide waterfront support

V.V.R. Sastry, Chairman, BEL, says that his company will manufacture systems for the Indigenous Aircraft Carrier. In a chat with S. Anandan.

V.V.R. Sastry.

The product support centre being set up by the Navaratna public sector unit, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), will also offer waterfront support. Kochi, the only recognised port city in the country to handle explosives, will thus be the third, after Mumbai and Visakhapatnam, to have waterfront support as well.

“The facility here, however, will be one step ahead of them as it will also have outsourcing and research and development (R&D) activities as well,” V.V.R. Sastry, Chairman and Managing Director of BEL, told The Hindu in an exclusive tête-À-tête.

“BEL does three types of activity. Manufacturing or production is one aspect, but we have now restricted ourselves to a few core areas (like defence) vis-À-vis production. Outsourcing is another. We have been giving lot of work to Keltron, helping to revitalise it. R&D is the third area and we are interacting with many R&D labs. However, concurrent engineering demands interaction right from the beginning of a project. We have a lot of interaction with the Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory (NPOL) here and therefore we want our team to be stationed here for the interaction to take place on a regular basis,” said Mr. Sastry.

Regarding waterfront support, he said that the Navy that makes use of BEL-made electronic systems would get benefited. “We would repair electronic equipment onboard ships and provide software upgrade as well. Then there is the Cochin Shipyard where the Indigenous Aircraft Carrier (IAC) is under construction. We will manufacture a lot of systems for the ship like the electronic warfare systems, radars, communication systems, fire control systems and combat management systems that would be integrated and installed here itself,” he said.

On Revathi, the naval variant of the surveillance radar Rohini, he said it would complete all trials by December this year. “There were some observations made in the last two trials and those have been rectified.”

The company has been coming out with spin-off products for the civil sector, too.

“We are readying new versions of electronic voting machine and RFID (radio frequency identification) devices and are now looking to augment our capabilities in homeland security. It has doubtless a tremendous market and so our range of products would cover intruder alarms, underwater detection, command and control systems, access control systems and the like,” said Mr. Sastry, signing off.

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