Bharat Electronics Ltd expects to get a big push to its civil sector radar capability once its venture with Thales of France gets off the ground.
Mostly imported now, they will be used to manage air traffic at civil and military airports; or as ‘fire control’ radars in battles.
BEL’s Chairman and Managing Director Anil Kumar affirmed that the State-owned defence electronics major would get to produce certain new non-military and military radars not made by it so far.
The venture would be three-way, with a modest total investment of around Rs 60 crore. The formality of the Government and FIPB clearances is due.
“Now we will apply to the Government. We hope to form the joint venture in three months,” Anil Kumar recently told Business Line .
BEL would hold 74 per cent in the venture and put in Rs 40-45 crore as per the cap on defence. Thales India Pvt Ltd and its French defence electronics parent would partner in the remaining stake.
The radar venture was among a couple of BEL’s tie-ups hanging for the past few years. The first steps were taken when the Thales board cleared it, followed by BEL’s board last month.
Coastal surveillance
Radars are widely used in civil and military airports, on planes, ships, missiles, tanks and in ground systems. The Ministry of Home Affairs is putting in place a radar-based coastal surveillance system. A large number of them would be needed in the coming years, said I.V. Sarma, BEL’s Director (R&D).
Post-Kargil attack, BEL has produced large numbers of the Battlefield Surveillance Radar that detects infiltrators at borders; and the Weapon Locating Radar to detect the source of incoming rocket or gun fire. (Most of our Kargil casualties are said to have happened due to undetected enemy fire.) The radars were designed by and developed by the Bangalore-based DRDO lab, LRDE. BEL’s radars business is around Rs 1,000 crore in a defence-led business totally worth almost Rs 6,000 crore for fiscal 2011-12. Sarma said the gains for the country would come as access to new and hard-to-get technologies, software and global business prospects. In 2009, he had said the domestic radar market would grow to Rs 40,000 crore this decade.
He said BEL’s ten-year business plan foresaw good technology and commercial spin-offs from this, but did not spell out details.
An old BEL ally, Thales supplies many systems for Dassault’s MMRCA fighter plane – which is in the last lap of the IAF bid. It is also active in HAL’s Mirage-2000 fighter upgrade programme and in the Delhi Metro automated fare collection system.
Meanwhile BEL’s other proposal, a missile seeker venture with Rafael Advanced Defence Systems of Israel, remains in uncertainty. Global major Rafael wants the equity cap for the tie-up at 50:50, well above the prescribed 26 per cent in defence. BEL continues to work at this resistance, Anil Kumar said.