Rail wheel factory to focus on exports

With railways still dependent on imports for its wheel requirements, a new plant at Chapra in Bihar and a capacity building proposal for the rail wheel factory here can not only make it self sufficient but also allow it to export its goods to other countries.

"We are in the process of preparing a proposal for capacity building and we will soon send it to the Railway Board," Sudha Chaubey, general manager, Rail Wheel Factory, Bangalore, said here. The rail wheel factory fulfills over 50 per cent demand for wheel sets while the the rest are supplied by the Durgapur plant and are imported.

According to railway sources, the plan, which they said is still in initial stages, will cost about Rs 100 crore and will augment the capacity of the Bangalore plant, which now manufactures nearly 1.10 lakh wheels per annum, by another 50,000. The present requirement in the country is of 2.10 lakh wheels.

"The demand has increased rapidly in the last five- six years and it is expected that the trend will be maintained, increasing the capacity shortage," Chaubey said. The Durgapur plant at present produces 50,000 wheels but officials said it is not enough since it also manufactures wheels for coaches.

Officials at the Rail Wheel Factory, Bangalore hope that besides adequate supply of power and other infrastructure, the plant's experience in exporting wheels to other countries including the US, will help in getting the nod from Centre for the proposal. "We have been exporting wheels, axles and wheel sets to the US, Vietnam, Malaysia, Sudan, Tanzanaia, Myanmar and many other countries since 1995-96 and we are consistently getting inquiries from other countries, including Pakistan and Russia. But it is only in very small numbers just to make our presence felt in the world market to show that we have the capacity and the technology to produce so that we can cach on it later," the official said.

"We still have our limitations as we are still unable to meet the domestic demands and even today railways is importing wheels," she said. The Bangalore rail wheel plant has been working to its full capacity, officials said and has been surpassing the annual targets set by the centre. While in 1995 the target was for 95,081 wheels, 48,000 axles and 32,400 wheel sets, the actual production was 95, 125 wheels, 49, 502 axles and 32,732 axles.

This year also, till October the plant has manufactured 77,831 wheels surpassing the target of 75,607, the highest ever in the plant's history. experts at the rail wheel factory are now preparing to share their expertise for the development of the wheel plant at Chapra. "The Chapra plant will almost be a prototype of the Bangalore plant, using similar technology including using railway scrap as raw material," Chaubey said.

Railway officials said the plant at Chapra will take some time to come up as there are some obvious infrastructure bottlenecks. power, roads and other infrastructure need to be developed first and talks are on with other government departments in this regard, they said.

An important feature of the Bangalore plant is that it recycles railway scrap to mould new wheels.