T Suvarna Raju, who recently took charge as the chairman of Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), has led several initiatives at HAL.

Operational excellence

While under his leadership, India achieved selfreliance in producing 25kN turbofan engines, he also drafted HAL’s first research and development (R&D) policy.

“Given the high expectation built around the company, my priorities would be to concentrate on operational excellence, and build the company as a technology powerhouse”, he said.

He further added that he is committed to set HAL as one of the best examples that align with the “Make-in-India” endeavour of the Government though he is aware that it is a challenging job.

HAL has applied for an unprecedented number of over 1,000 patents in the last two years.

Born in the village of P Vemavaram of Tanuku (West Godavari) district in Andhra Pradesh, Raju, an engineering graduate, joined HAL on June 26, 1980, as a management trainee. He heralded a new era in research and development programmes that covered LCA, LUH, LCH, IJT, HTT-40, Jaguar DARIN-III, Mirage Upgrade, etc. Significant milestones have been achieved on the R&D front with the delivery of first series production LCA-Tejas aircraft and ground-test-vehicle-run of Light Utility Helicopter (LUH). With his leadership, all the design centres were brought under the ambit of Committee of Institutional Network to synergise learning across the organisation.

The policy has enabled the creation of a corpus for the R&D by keeping aside 10 per cent of the Operating Profit after Tax

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