Bharat Forge, which recently began supplying indigenously developed locomotive crankshafts for the Indian Railways, hopes to expand the business and also begin making components like turbo-chargers, parallel pistons and connecting rods among others for the rail industry.

The Pune-based company, says Chairman and Managing Director Baba Kalyani, is now the largest forgings company in the world. It has supplied around 100 crankshafts to the Indian Railways in the last 6-8 months.

Currently, the sole manufacturer of locomotive crankshafts in India, BFL makes and machines them at a high tech locomotive components manufacturing facility at Baramati where it has installed a capacity of almost 1500 units per annum for the product.

At Baramati, Bharat Forge has invested around Rs 700 crore over the last four years to cater to the rail and aviation businesses.

“We expect to sell around 400 locomotive crankshafts in India and overseas next year,” Kalyani said, adding that the Indian market for the product is around 500 units annually, including 150 units for replacement. The other markets for the product are Russia, Europe and the US.

The company has also drawn up a list of a handful of components and completed development of 80% of them, Kalyani said. Primary amongst these is a turbocharger that has been re-engineered using the expertise of a technology company in Vermont USA and a professor at Oxford University.

The redesigning will help cut fuel costs of rail engines – currently around Rs 12,000 crore per annum in India – by over 10% Kalyani avers.

Growing the rail business is part of BFL’s strategy to develop each of five relatively new non-auto verticals – the others being oil and gas, aerospace, marine and defence – to $ 100 million each.

BFL expects to achieve the target by 2018, Kalyani said.

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