The Hindu Business Line : DEMA plans testing facility in Pune

At a glance
Facility to be set up at an investment of Rs 6 crore.
It will be a centralised reliability, product proving, field trial facility.
Rs 5 crore sought from Centre for corpus fund

Pune , Sept. 21

City based DEMA (Defence Equipment Manufacturers Association), a group of small and medium enterprises engaged in manufacturing for defence establishments, has decided to create a corpus fund to facilitate defence related research and development effort amongst its members.

It also plans to set up a testing facility in Pune for defence products.

Talking to presspersons, Mr D.S. Kamlapurkar, President DEMA, said the initial investment of setting up the testing facility would be close to Rs 6 crore, apart from the cost of the land. These funds are expected to be generated from the DEMA members.

The testing facility would be a centralised reliability, product proving and field trial facility for speeding up development and manufacturing process.

He said that currently the association did not have a testing facility but had the equipment required for testing.

The testing is now carried out at ARAI (Automobile Research Association of India) or in the auto cluster. The current strength of the association is about 40 members, of which over 80 per cent are based in Pune.

The capital investments of member industries put together would be about Rs 150 crore and the annual turnover is around Rs 320 crore.

Eyeing more share

He said that of the Rs 320 crore, the turnover from the manufacturing for defence is about Rs 25 crore.

He said it was estimating to increase the share of its manufacturing for defence and was targeting Rs 70 crore within the next three years.

Regarding the corpus fund, Mr Kamlapurkar said this was the first-of-its-kind effort where it would be attracting investments in R&D and has already put in a request to the Central Government for a fund of Rs 5 crore.

He said during the past five years, DEMA members had developed and commissioned four different projects under the consortium route.

These projects included on board high frequency transreceiver for guided missile, stabilised target tracking platforms, explosive decompression and recompression chambers for training of fighter pilots and unmanned aerial vehicle for surveillance.

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