Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) chairman and managing director Commodore Siddharth Mishra (Retd) said that the upcoming Jhansi unit will be manufacturing propulsion systems to be used in all anti-tank guided missiles and futuristic missiles manufactured by the company on Saturday.
“This is an important step towards the backward integration plan being implemented to further strengthen the capability to deliver world-class weapon systems. We propose to invest up to ₹400 crore for various technologies at this location,” he said.
The upcoming unit will be the sixth manufacturing unit and the first one in northern part having its registered office here.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone for setting up this manufacturing unit in Uttar Pradesh in the ‘Defence Corridor’ on Friday in the presence of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and other dignitaries.
The company has acquired the land and is planning to commence operations by 2023, which would create lot of employment opportunities for people in the region once fully operational with many ancillary units in the small, medium and micro enterprises to come up.
The Ministry of Defence firm is one among the few companies in the world having state-of-the-art facilities for manufacture and supply of anti-tank guided missiles, surface-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, air-to-surface missiles, underwater weapons and counter measures systems for the armed forces, informed the CMD in an official release.
BDL has also designed and developed drone-delivered bombs and the focus will continue to be on the concept of indigenisation across its programmes with the average percentage between 80-90%.
“This philosophy helped us reduce the import cost and offer competitively priced products to the armed forces. This has been very important factor since the armed forces are getting latest products with assured product life cycle support from BDL,” said Mr. Mishra.
In line with the ‘AatmaNirbhar Bharat’ initiative of the Government, BDL has furthered its indigenisation processes by involving several vendors including MSMEs, who indigenise components through the ‘Srijan’ portal, he said and pointed out the firm has a ‘robust vendor echo system’ and a strong supply chain spread across the county.
The strong in-house R&D division with talent drawn from premier institutions has been leveraging emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop state-of-the-art weapons including next generation missile programmes.
Agreements were signed with foreign original equipment manufacturers and start-up companies to develop weapons of next generation.
Torpedoes were exported to a friendly ‘foreign’ country and other leads were being explored, the released added.
