Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), the Bangalore-based public sector undertaking under the ministry of defence, is planning to increase its research and development (R&D) budget by a huge proportion, from the present 5 per cent to 10 per cent of its annual turnover in the next two years, a top BEL official said.
“Presently, 50 per cent of our annual turnover of Rs 4,800 crore comes from the products developed by our in-house R&D units. Over the next three to five years we plan to increase it to 75 per cent annually. To achieve the target we need to develop more in-house products and that requires additional budgets,” Ashwani Kumar Datt, chairman and managing director, BEL, said.
As a result of the rise in its turnover year-on-year, BEL’s R&D budget is also rising. For 2009-10, BEL has earmarked Rs 250 crore as the R&D budget, a growth of about 19 per cent over the previous fiscal.
“We will not be comfortable with 5 per cent of the turnover as the R&D budget. Because, to achieve a turnover of Rs 10,000 crore in 2012-13, we need to develop more indigenous products and that requires huge amounts of money. So, we are planning to increase the R&D budget to about 8-10 per cent of our turnover over the next couple of years,” Datt said.
At the same time, he said the challenge is to enable R&D engineers to spend that much money effectively.
Presently, BEL does much of the R&D work at three strategic business units (SBUs) in the Bangalore and Ghaziabad units. In addition to this, it has seven more centres where the research work is done depending on the products manufactured there. All the 17 SBUs have dedicated R&D units to look after the immediate research and development works of that SBU. It has around 2,500 engineers working in its R&D centres, Datt said.
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Apart from the SBU-level R&D, BEL also has its central R&D centre at Bangalore, where it makes modules that are common to various systems and products like signal processing. This centre gets projects from units and develops products for them. It also has a Central Research Laboratory in Bangalore and Ghaziabad.
They look into futuristic research and are engaged in developing cutting-edge technology work in the areas of electronic warfare systems, radars among others.