The Hindu Business Line : Bosch bets on partnership with engg colleges

JOINING HANDS: Mr S.R.K. Prasad (right), Director of Coimbatore Institute of Technology, exchanging documents with Mr K. Swaminathan, Deputy General Manager of Robert Bosch India Ltd, Coimbatore, in Coimbatore on Friday. - M. Periasamy

Coimbatore June 3 Robert Bosch India Ltd (RBIL), which has inked a pact with Coimbatore Institute of Technology (CIT) to provide for the latter's graduate and post graduate students to do project work there, is also looking for similar collaboration with other educational institutions in Tamil Nadu.

Robert Bosch is also looking at industry-academic interaction as a means to identify promising students to whom it could provide employment opportunities later.

Speaking to newsmen after signing a MoU with CIT, Mr K. Swaminathan, Deputy General Manager and Development Centre-Head, RBIL, Coimbatore, said Robert Bosch had two developmental facilities — at Bangalore and Coimbatore — employing about 4,000 people. Currently, the Coimbatore facility has about 300 persons working and this would grow to 700 by the end of the year. The company has plans to increase the headcount to 2,500 by 2010 at its centre in Coimbatore.

Indian centres

The Coimbatore centre of Robert Bosch has mostly embedded systems in areas of electronics, automotive engineering and mechanical engineering. The hardware, software and system development works are done at Coimbatore.

The Coimbatore facility would grow like the Bangalore facility, where about 3,400 are now employed and both would be doing similar work in areas like IT, automotive engineering and mechanical engineering.

The Indian centres were doing a lot of R&D work for the Bosch group, meeting part of its needs, and similar facilities exist in other countries such as the US, Germany, Japan etc. The Bangalore and Coimbatore development centres together form the largest developmental facility for the Bosch group outside Germany.

Mr Swaminathan said Robert Bosch had started with CIT its collaborative venture and the company wanted to bridge the gap between the industry and academic institutions. It was interested in talking to other institutions not only in Coimbatore but also in other centres such as Madurai and Chennai "to get the best of talent into Bosch".

Spotting talent

Answering a question, he said one of the objectives of this interaction was to spot talented students for eventual absorption into Bosch. It looked at students from the `circuit branches' — ECE, CSE, IT and EEE - apart from mechanical and instrumentation engineering branches.

He said Robert Bosch's facility was located at rented premises at Saravanampatti near the city and it intended to move to its own premises at a later stage. Currently, the company is not looking at spreading its wings to other cities.

Dr S.R.K. Prasad, Director, CIT, said the selection of his college for collaboration was a "big milestone" for CIT, since Robert Bosch would be establishing its R&D facility at the college for the benefit of the students. There would also be a `Bosch corner' that would have a library to display books on technology and related materials.