Will Hinjewadi get better infrastructure in 2012?

Tata Motors inaugurated India’s first Jaguar Land (JLR) Rover vehicle assembly plant in Pune in May this year. Close on the heels of the inauguration of the JLR plant was the July 2011 initiative of General Motors India which launched the diesel model of their Chevrolet Beat small car

Pune Incorporated had a busy 2011. There was much activity in almost all sectors - be it automobile, information technology or manufacturing. In June 2011, the spotlight was firmly on the Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park, where hundreds of IT professionals came on the streets in heavy rain to protest against the poor infrastructure facilities at the IT park.

The techies had come together under the banner of ‘Hinjewadi First’, a campaign to draw the state government’s attention to inadequate infrastructure, traffic management and security at the high profile location.

The 2,000-acre IT park, which houses IT majors such as Infosys, Wipro, TCS, IBM and Tech Mahindra among others, provides direct employment to nearly 7,00,000 software professionals. Last year, exports from the IT park were valued at $4 billion, which was nearly 7% of India’s total IT exports.

Significantly, in October 2011, paying heed to the protests by the techies, the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) decided to invest more than Rs60 crore for improving the existing roads and laying new ones at the IT park.

Predictably, Pune, which is known as the Detroit of the East, was also abuzz with automobile news. Tata Motors inaugurated India’s first Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) vehicle assembly plant in Pune in May this year.

The Pune facility will assemble the Land Rover Freelander-2 vehicles supplied in complete knock down (CKD) form from Jaguar Land Rover’s Halewood manufacturing plant in Liverpool, UK.

Close on the heels of the inauguration of the JLR plant was the July 2011 initiative of General Motors India (GMI) which launched the diesel model of their Chevrolet Beat small car.

Significantly, the car and its diesel engine are manufactured at the company’s Talegaon plant, which has the capacity to manufacture 6,000 diesel engines and 3,000 petrol engines a month. The company also has plans to start engine exports from this plant.
Later, auto major, Mahindra & Mahindra Limited moved into the world of aspirational sports utility vehicles (SUVs) with the launch of its international contender, the XUV500 (pronounced XUV five-double “o”) in Pune on September 29.

Importantly, the vehicle, which is manufactured at the company’s Chakan plant, had its international launch the very next day in South Africa.

In the manufacturing sector, Cummins India strengthened its Phaltan megasite, 100 km south of Pune, in August when it inaugurated its fourth facility, a parts distribution centre. With the launch of this fourth facility, the Cummins’ Group investment in the megasite is now approximately US $100 million. Earlier this year, the company had launched the first three facilities comprising the second manufacturing facility of Tata Cummins, an engine rebuild centre.

In December, the board of directors of both Kinetic Engineering Ltd (KEL) and Kinetic Motor Company Ltd (KMCL) approved a scheme of merger of the latter into the former. The merger will mark the culmination of restructuring at the Kinetic Group following which Kinetic Engineering will be re-organised to focus on automotive systems and the components business, especially power trains.

KMCL’s two-wheeler business was hived off to Mahindra two-wheeler Ltd (MTWL) in November 2008.