The project should get off the ground by November this year

AGRA: Eleven companies are set to manufacture military equipment — hand grenades, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and communication components — at the Aligarh node of the defence-industrial corridor in UP, additional chief secretary Awanish Awasthi said on Monday. The project should get off the ground by November this year.

The 53-hectare Aligarh node is one of six along the corridor, the others being Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, Chitrakoot and Jhansi. “A draft plan will be prepared in a month and work to offer basic amenities and infrastructure to the companies will begin by November this year,” said Awasthi, also chief executive officer of Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA), which is the nodal agency for the project. Aligarh deputy commissioner (industry) Srinath Paswan added that the government has decided to acquire more land for the corridor in the city.

Defence minister Rajnath Singh had on August 9 said that India would stop importing 101 items of military equipment that can be made by domestic manufacturers. “Investments of more than Rs 400 crore by the MSME sector here will give a big push to the country’s Make in India programme. Our priority is to encourage Indian investors since the defence minister wants items of military equipment to be made in India,” Awasthi said. However, he added, “We will surely get foreign investment once the project starts.” Most of the 11 companies who have been allotted land on the corridor now are from Aligarh, Delhi and Ghaziabad and are a mix of those that have been in the defence sector and those that have not.

Aligarh-based Deep Explo Equipment Pvt Ltd, for instance, has been operating in the defence sector for 26 years. It has been manufacturing tear gas shell assemblies (complete units), smoke covers and ignitors for missiles — Aakash, Pinaka, Concour, Invar, BrahMos and Torpedo — through its three major anchor units and with Bharat Dynamics Limited. “We have now entered a longer exclusive agreement to supply hardware components for hand grenades, multimode grenades for Army, and chaff and other flaring units for the Air Force,” Lalesh Saxena, managing director of the company, told TOI.

Nitya Creation India, also on the list of 11, has been engaged in the defence sector, manufacturing components for defence communication systems and supplying them to Bharat Electronics Limited for 15 years now. “We have signed an MoU with the UP government for manufacturing electromechanical components for aircraft communication systems,” Navneet Varshney, managing director of the Aligarh-based company, told TOI.

There are some new entrants as well, like Allen & Alvan Pvt Ltd, a hardware and security products manufacturing company. “We will enter the defence sector now. We are going to manufacture unmanned aerial vehicles and three allied items,” said Dhanjit Wadra, managing director of the company and president of the Federation of Innovative Manufacturers, which is also UPEIDA’s knowledge partner for the corridor.