The Hindu Business Line : BHEL to hire 20,000 in 11th Plan period

Chennai, Oct. 27 BHEL will hire 20,000 people in the 11th Plan period (2007-12), the Chairman and Managing Director of the public sector engineering giant, Mr A.K. Puri, has said. Nine thousand of them would be engineers, he said, at a press conference here.

BHEL is expanding its capacity. Today, it can make power equipment of 6,000 MW a year and it intends to take this up to 15,000 MW a year by 2009 and to 20,000 MW by 2011. This will require concurrent augmentation of manpower.

India intends to add 78,577 MW, at an estimated outlay of Rs 10.31 lakh crore, during the 11th Plan period. The power sector was caught on the wrong foot in the 10th Plan, when the actual addition to generation capacity was 21,180 MW against the target of 41,110 MW.

While the Ministry of Power has blamed equipment suppliers, mainly BHEL, for the lapse, BHEL has defended itself saying that orders were bunched during the last two years of the Plan period.

Dr R.C. Panda, Secretary, Department of Heavy Industries, under which comes BHEL, said in an informal chat with newspersons that power utilities such as NTPC have not standardised their projects, making it difficult for equipment suppliers to be prepared for bulk orders.

Power equipment market

While BHEL strives to keep its share in the power equipment market, it also intends to grow in other areas. For example, it expects its business from Defence to increase to Rs 1,000 crore, from Rs 300 crore at present.

Today, it manufactures naval and field guns and armoured vehicles. Mr Puri told Business Line that the Ministry of Defence had recently shortlisted BHEL for the supply of 10 types of equipment (names not divulged).

BHEL is positioning itself as a natural choice for overseas Defence equipment suppliers, who will need to procure 30 per cent of the value of their supplies from within India, under the ‘offset clause’ in Defence contracts.

Two other areas that BHEL is serious on are equipment for the Railways and the oil industry. For the railway business, BHEL is close to forging technology alliances for a range of products, such as signalling equipment, traction motors and rakes.

Similarly, for oil industry equipment, mainly onshore and offshore drilling rigs, BHEL is in talks with a few overseas companies for technology. Mr Puri ruled out BHEL getting into ship building.

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