Category Archives: Business & Economy

ICF-manufactured airconditioned EMU flagged off

Business & Economy, Records, All, Science & Technologies

Chennai  :

The first indigenous airconditioned 12-car rake (EMU) designed and manufactured for Mumbai suburban network at the Integral Coach Factory, Perambur, was flagged off on Thursday. The train was flagged off by the general manager Ashok Agarwal in the furnishing division of the factory at 5.30pm.

He also flagged off a conventional coach – one of the eight that was turned out today – to mark manufacture of 2000th coach by the factory in the financial year 2015-16. ICF manufactured a record 2005 coaches this year.

An official said, “The airconditioned suburban rake will be moved to Southern Railway’s yard probably on Monday for checks and certification required to attach it to a locomotive for shifting to Mumbai. The rake shows that we are ready to make airconditioned suburban trains which can be on a par with metro rail rakes made by foreign companies.”

The first rake with two driver motor cars and 2 non-driver motor cars with eight trailers will be put up for trials on Western Railway. Green signal will be given only after observing rake in service for three months. If the trials are successful in Mumbai, production of the remaining nine airconditioned rakes will begin.

The EMU train set has several features, including a 15-tonne roof-mounted package units for air and a 15-tonne AC will provide cooling in six coaches. A/C will cut off when temperature reaches 23 degrees Celsius and switch on at 25degree centigrade. Fans are also provided.

The stainless steel body coach has electrically operated automatic sliding doors, air-tight gangways in all trailer coaches, wide and large double-seated glass windows for panoramic view and GPS-based LED display for passenger information and announcement system.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India /News Home> City> Chennai / by U. Tejonmayam / TNN / March 31st, 2016

Scrap recycled into desks and shelves

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Business & Economy, Education, Inspiration/ Positive News and Features
Desks and shelf made from scrap by Suzlon was donated to a primary school in Coimbatore district recently.
Desks and shelf made from scrap by Suzlon was donated to a primary school in Coimbatore district recently.

Large quantities of packaging material that goes as scrap has been recycled by Suzlon here and made into desks and shelves and distributed to schools in five villages in the district.

Recycled

According to a spokesperson of Suzlon, which has installed 2,000 MW of wind turbines in the State, 1,240 kg of wooden scrap was recycled into 40 desks and 20 shelves.

Suzlon group has a panel manufacturing unit in Coimbatore district.

The packaging material used at the panel unit usually goes as scrap after use.

These have been made into school furniture with resources available in-house and distributed to schools as part of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity.

Good response

The spokesperson said that since the response from the schools was also good, the group plans to make more school furniture using the material.

It distributed 20 desks and five shelves so far to five elementary schools so that children can sit around the desk and take up learning activities.

Activities

Suzlon foundation conducts CSR activities such as health camp, skill training, developing kitchen garden, and cleaning of overhead tanks in select villages in the district.

“This is the first time that we have tried recycling the scrap material and we plan to do more of if,” the spokesperson said.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Coimbatore / by M. Soundariya Preetha / Coimbatore – March 30th, 2016

A Chennai City Woman Turns Organic Farmer

Business & Economy, Green Initiatives/ Environment, Nature
Anuradha Balaji at her farm in Thiruvallur district D Sampath Kumar
Anuradha Balaji at her farm in Thiruvallur district D Sampath Kumar

Chennai :

When we talk of women breaking social barriers, we hardly think of them as farmers. But that’s what Anuradha Balaji of Villivakkam has done. She bought a piece of land in neighbouring Tiruvallur district, set up a farm there, and manages it almost single-handedly. She travels an hour every day to the farm at Periyapalayam and supervises the workers.

“Many people in this locality thought I’m a soft-spoken Brahmin woman who would be scared of problems and soon sell the land. But I chose to fight and asked thorough questions to get the benefits,” Anuradha Balaji tells City Express. She narrates an incident when officials asked for unnecessary documents to provide benefits to farmers. “I realised that being a woman farmer is not easy. But I fought the discrimination with support from my husband and family,” she says.

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Even as she speaks to the reporter, she instructs the farm workers to stop the flow of water. “It’s afternoon; don’t water plants and trees now,” she tells them and adds that her farm (eight acres of land) is an organic farm.

“We use organic ingredients for manure, including a mix of cow urine, dung and dry leaves,” she says. How did the 43-year-old with a masters degree in library and information science and a career as a librarian in Saudi Arabia take up farming?

“I worked there for 10 years. But when I got back, the first thing I wanted to do was farming. With my husband’s help, I bought the land near Vadamadurai. My uncle too encouraged me and I finally set up this farm in 2008,” she recalls.

“Both of us were interested in organic farming for several years. My wife decided to start doing what we always wished to. I support her financially,” says Balaji, adding that he might be able to help her even more when he returns from Saudi Arabia, where he now works.

But Anuradha doesn’t depend on her husband alone. She works in such a way that the farm sustains itself. She does inter-crop cultivation, so if one crop fails, the other crop would her make ends meet. She also makes value-added products from farm produce.

“If the market for gooseberries is poor, we make candy and pickle. We also grow rice and other grains and vegetables. We also plan to grow herbal plants for medicinal use. Right now, we are laying the foundation. My failures have taught me how to manage a farm. Without my family’s support, I wouldn’t be able to do what I had always dreamed of,” she smiles.

Shankar, a chemical engineer who quit his job to assist her, explains, “We want to do integrated farming. We plan to bring in native cows also, which will help in farming and (provide) manure. Man, land and animals are interconnected and we should preserve them.”

Couple share the same passion

“Both of us were interested in organic farming for several years. My wife decided to start doing what we always wished to. I support her financially,” says Balaji, adding that he might be able to help her even more when he returns from Saudi Arabia, where he now works.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Sremathi M / March 29th, 2016

Noyyal restoration begins

Business & Economy, Green Initiatives/ Environment, Nature
Social activist Anna Hazare and actor Suriya at the launch of Noyyalai Nokki , an initiative to restore the Noyyal, in Coimbatore on Saturday.— Photo: S. Siva Saravanan
Social activist Anna Hazare and actor Suriya at the launch of Noyyalai Nokki , an initiative to restore the Noyyal, in Coimbatore on Saturday.— Photo: S. Siva Saravanan

It was a festive occasion at Kooduthurai (Alandurai) near the foothills of the Western Ghats, here on Saturday evening.

Hundreds gathered for the launch of Noyyalai Nokki , a people’s initiative to restore the 160-km long river.

The river originates in the Western Ghats and passes through Coimbatore, Tirupur, Erode, and Karur districts to join the Cauvery at Noyyal village.

“I want to come after two years to see the Noyyal restored,” said social activist Anna Hazare at the launch function. It is important to focus on conservation of land and water resources for development, he said.

Earlier, he told reporters that linking of rivers was good if it was done scientifically. It was important to plan water management, conserve natural resources, take up rainwater harvesting and restore rivers.

Actor Suriya, who participated at the inaugural of Noyyalai Nokki , said the confidence of the people gathered in restoring the river gave hope for restoration of more rivers across the State. It was necessary to take up such projects and conserve water bodies for the benefit of the future generations.

According to Vanitha Mohan, Managing Trustee of Siruthuli, it was a joint project by the public to restore the river.

C.R. Swaminathan, chairman of Noyyal River Restoration Federation, said the project would be implemented on divide-distribute-develop model by forming committees for every 500 metres of the river. Volunteers, educational institutions, non-governmental organisations and the government will be involved. To begin with, a survey of the river would be taken up and an estimate of the project would be prepared. Steps would be taken to install sewage treatment plants to prevent waste water from entering the river, said S.V. Balasubramaniam, chairman of Siruthuli.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Coimbatore / by Special Correspondent / Coimbatore f- March 27th, 2016

A glass act

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Business & Economy

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Anjali Srinivasan was recently selected as one of the ‘Swarovski Designers of the Future’. The glass-smith from Chennai talks about art as an invitation to dialogue, sustainable design and her vision for future living

To Anjali Srinivasan, the kiln is where the art is. It is where the familiar meets the imagined, where strength courts fragility and where physical forms signal ephemeral experiences. The idea of working with red-hot molten material, and learning to control it as it transformed from solid to liquid and back to solid, unfolded when she visited Firozabad, India’s glass hub, during her student days at the National Institute of Fashion Technology.

Anjali’s sense of inquiry about the medium took her to Alfred University in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design, where she invoked new ways of working with glass. ‘Puffy Glass’, one of her many inventive departures, was the outcome of “intensive research in particle activism”.

Back in India in 2010, she worked with traditional glass artisans in Firozabad, Purdilnagar and Papanaidupet, before setting up a studio in SIDCO Women’s Industrial Park near Pallavaram in 2011. With ‘Depths of Field’, where she showcased a wearable glass sculpture and an installation that sprayed turmeric and coffee into the gallery when a participant pulled at its strings, and ‘Of Shifting Natures’, the highlight of which were digital prints on flat glass and a mirror-painting diptych encrusted with tiny convex mirrors that turned the viewer’s movement in front of it into its subject matter, Anjali subverted preconceptions of her medium. After many solo shows and honours, she moved to Dubai last year “as a random life experiment”, and set up ChoChoMa Studios, where she provides customised solutions in hand-crafted glass and conceptualises themes for art shows. It was during a showing at the Dubai Design Week last year that ‘Untitled’, an 11-ft high archway with web-like glass filaments co-constructed with visitors, caught the attention of the Swarovski-Design Miami/Basel team scouting for convention-challenging talents.

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In an e-mail interaction, the artist talks about the honour and the less-trodden paths her work is leading her to. What you cannot ignore is the fact that to this artist, the glass is only half full — always!

What did the Swarovski selection panel find unique about your work?

They informed me that I had been selected through a nomination process. The curator felt that my approach was worthy of recognition, as it showed a new way forward for creative process and its engagement with people.

Since it’s a Swarovski honour, would the assignment involve working with crystals?

The award comes with a commission, and so yes, I will be working with Swarovski to create something new for Design Basel in June 2016. Who knows what the future holds past that, but since I am interested in optical phenomena, and crystals epitomise optics, I hope to continue using crystals.

The optical behaviour of crystal is quite different from glass…

For me, the task of working across media lies in being able to speak in the voice of each material, and bring out a conversation or collaboration between them. I see harmony as just one theme in design. Sometimes, the communication of diversity, tension or even conflict between media helps in the effectiveness of a work.

Going by your repertoire, it’s apparent that art is part of the dialogue in any interior space you create…

I am foremost an artist; it is about how I see the world and relate to my existence. My design practice feeds into building that overall philosophy, and I am fortunate to be able to interpret interior spaces in that sense.

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You’ve used spices, dough, coffee powder at shows… What are your latest experiments?

I’m working on transitioning from a crusty, rock-like glass entity to a sublimated, light-infused crystal body, all in the same object. I hope this investigation can be used in the Swarovski project. Simultaneously, I am looking at expanding the material language of glass bangle-making. I want to build a new vocabulary that sustains the craft tradition across its current boundaries.

What drew you to Dubai?

I realised that living and working in my home country was not conducive to my practice. Also, I had outgrown the job market in the U.S., from where I had relocated to India. I looked for some place in-between India and the U.S. My gallerist was showing works at Art Dubai with significant success. It was a random life experiment to see what it is like to set up a creative enterprise in Dubai.

What led you to launch ChoChoMa? In what way has the studio pushed the frontiers of glass and nurtured craftsmanship?

ChoChoMa Studios is named after my grandmother. It was started originally as a fair-trade umbrella for glass artisans I was working with in Delhi in 2005. The goal was to upgrade technology, offer design inputs and guide artisans to sell directly to consumers. I wanted the handicraft glass sector in India to have a voice in creative activity. But, since then, its role has changed, according to what I responded to most. We showcased contemporary art collaboration with traditional artisans during Art Chennai in 2014. Today, we are a start-up in West Asia, working on design projects, teaching students about glassmaking and making impossible ideas happen through art.

Yes, it has been an important concern of the Studio. We just created tableware for a restaurant, by splicing old water bottles. We are working on large wall panels that use bottle glass, for a city-wide recycle centre initiative of the Dubai Municipality. Each panel saves 50 kg of consumer glass from landfills — a heartening application of sustainable design.

What is your vision of future living? Where do you see your medium going?

My vision is less dissonance between humans, and humans and their objects. Creative glass exploration, with recent developments of 3D printing and lathe-working, is heading towards breaking traditional boundaries with technology, as well as being a medium of performance, time and phenomenon-based interfaces.

Three names were announced by Swarovski (including a two-member design team). In what way do you think your work will be different?

I’d like to believe that each of our works will be special, based on our vastly different backgrounds. I am the only artist in the lot. So, my approach will be more conceptual and I will explore the philosophies I am invested in. I was told that I am the first Indian designer, and also the first glass-maker chosen for the honour. I have been encouraged to use my own glass in collaboration with crystal, so I imagine that will define the project as being unique. My sensibilities are Indian, my skill-base is American, and I am working out of West Asia and imagining with Swarovski crystals! Surely that adds up to something significant, right?

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus> Society / by  T. Krithika Reddy / March 22nd, 2016

MADE IN MADRAS – The art of appalam

Business & Economy, Historical Links, Pre-Independence

It began in a small household in Triplicane… Here’s the story of Ambika Appalam, established long before the Second World War

Ambika Appalam owes its legacy to a man called Ayappan
Ambika Appalam owes its legacy to a man called Ayappan

They say the trick to achieving the perfect appalam lies in the hands of the maker. The process is referred to as appalam ‘iduradhu’ — a Tamil word that doesn’t have an exact English equivalent. Shaping, perhaps? It is a task that requires far more than a machine’s precision. Which is why at Ambika Appalam, every appalam is still hand-made. “I spent lots of money in R&D on making them with machines,” says K.V. Vijayaraghavan, who owns the company. “But I was not successful. Something or the other would go wrong if a machine was employed. The dough wouldn’t be right or the appalam would turn brown when fried.”

Ambika Appalam owes its legacy to a man called Ayappan, about whom the present generation that runs the company knows little. “All I’ve heard about him is from my father K.A. Velayudham. Poverty forced Ayappan, my grandfather, to come from Kerala to Madras to make a living,” remembers Vijayaraghavan.

This was in the 1920s. Far from home, Ayappan started with what most of his neighbours in Triplicane did — making papadums. A little moist before being fried, a papadum puffed up like a poori when it came into contact with hot oil.

And so the young Ayappan, barely into his twenties, made dough using urad dal and shaped it into little circles. Although they cost just a few annas, each one was handled with care. He sun-dried them, packed them into bundles of 100, and arranged the lot in a bag. This marked step-1. Step-2, the more difficult one, consisted of Ayappan journeying with his precious cargo to various houses in the area to sell them.

The business gradually developed, and Ayappan married and started a family. His wife and children then joined him in making papadums at home.

Soon, Velayudham took over. He made appalams instead, for the lifespan of an appalam was up to a year, but that of a papadum was just seven days. It was Velayudham who gave his family business a brand and an identity — he named it Ambika, after his favourite goddess back home in Kerala. An artist in the neighbourhood sketched their logo — a line drawing of a goddess seated on a lotus. Even today, the same logo with the tagline ‘Azhagaai porium’, meaning ‘Fries beautifully’, adorns their wrappers, except that it has been embellished with technology.

Velayudham ferried appalams in a cycle to not just households in Triplicane, but to those as far as Tambaram. “My father then opened a small shop in Mathala Narayanan Street in Mylapore,” says Vijayaraghavan. It was “just enough for one person to stand amidst the appalam bundles.” From then on, Ambika grew much like a dream business, with Velayudham opening one shop after the other across the city.

They did have a hitch. In 1966, the business was shut down due to labour issues. “We had about 600 people working for us then. They would work from 3 a.m. to 7 p.m. in three houses in Triplicane that doubled as their workplace,” recalls Vijayaraghavan. Suddenly, it was all over. But they bounced back, with well-wishers who worked for them, offering to make appalams for them in their respective households.

It’s this model that the company follows till date — apart from their factory in Choolaimedu, their appalams are made in households across Chennai and Kanchipuram as per Vijayaraghavan’s specifications.

The crispy appalam that reaches our plate is extremely delicate in its initial stage. “If the maker grips a just-shaped appalam hard, it might break. But if not held properly, it might slip and lose shape,” says Vijayaraghavan. “This is why they stack the circles and pat it together. This is tricky too, for the circles might stick.”

Vijayaraghavan has various memorable customers – Kavignar Kannadasan among them. “He would buy an entire tin,” recalls Vijayaraghavan. The poet was a huge fan of Ambika’s potato chips.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Akila Kannadasan / Chennai – March 15th, 2016

Oxford Professor’s Tryst with Arni That Sparked a Lifelong Romance

Business & Economy, Education, Records, All, World Opinion

In 1960s, Barbara Harriss-White along with her husband John Harriss began an extraordinary journey driving down from Europe to India in an old Ford van to take part in a mountaineering expedition to Kishtwar Himalayas.

The journey changed her life forever and for the next 44 years, Barbara spent visiting Indian small towns to understand the informal capitalist economy and its regulative politics. She chose Arni, a municipality in Tiruvannamalai district, for her life time study.

In an exclusive e-mail interview with S V Krishna Chaitanya from Oxford ahead of the International Women’s Day on March 8, Barbara, who is an Emeritus Fellow, Professor of Development Studies and Senior Research Fellow in Area Studies at Oxford University, took him through her astonishing journey, her love for India, especially Tamil Nadu, which sowed the seeds for her lifelong study that inspired her to pen 35 books, over 225 book chapters and journal papers, almost all on India. Her work in India is now setting a trend for other sociologists across the world to take up similar studies of small towns.

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Excerpts from the interview:

Tell us about the experience of driving all the way from Europe to India.

In the 1960s many young people from Europe took the Overland Route in search of exotic India. We had been invited to a mountaineering expedition to Kishtwar Himalayas. Mountaineering had suited my need to escape and learn about extreme environments. We were poor students at Cambridge. My husband John bought an old Ford van, and we set out. The experience was life-changing. Our van passed through Pakistan descending down the Khyber Pass. The Green Revolution was in its infancy in both Punjabs.

Why did you choose the town Arni for your lifelong study?

People ask me why bother to sweat it out in episodes of field research over four decades in a rapidly growing and changing town, Arni, that is obscure to all but those who live there? With a touch of incredulity local businessmen enjoyed the sight of a European woman, tailed in those days by a line of small ragged children, drawing maps of the businesses in town.

It became known locally as ‘professor’s work’. Because of Arni’s multiple societal dynamics and it being at the centre of the Green Revolution on TN’s Coromandel plain, I chose this town. Besides, it was also the closest market town to the village in which my husband John was researching capitalism and peasant farming.

What purpose did such exhaustive study of a small town serve? Whom does it benefit?

Over four decades, this research has explored a rolling agenda of questions about ‘Middle India’, non-metropolitan India’s economic and social development, which cannot be answered in any other way than through sustained or long-term rural and urban field research.

Over the years it has been possible to build an archive of comparative field material on rural markets and the policy processes through which the State intends to control them on the ground: rice in southern India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and West Bengal; coarse grains in central India and Francophone West Africa; and lately jhum products in Arunachal. A Chinese sociologist is taking the questions we asked in Arni to market towns in China. If only a young generation of Indian scholars would carry it on into the future!

What are the challenges you faced…did the people accept you to begin with?

To start with, I found Tamil very hard to learn because in the field, talking to businessmen I had no opportunity to practice, make mistakes and learn this beautiful but difficult language. Gradually I came to terms with the fact that I would never be a fluent speaker but I understand the language – territory of my research and work through assistants.

This means I can check and write down the interviews while the conversation is being choreographed. In fact, in juggling all these roles at once, an English interview is quite difficult!

The first wholesaler I ever interviewed, one very long evening in Vellore in 1973, took me through the entire process of paddy and rice marketing and milling and taught me about equipment, technical terms and the tricks of the trade. That was a revelation and a huge gift. Some of the most fascinating details come as digressions in talks about politics, or how local business builds the local economy or visits to meet their families at home.

Is the rural India keeping up with the pace of urban India which is seeing rapid growth?

That’s a question not answerable through field economics. It needs all India statistics, which many feel are not reliable. But we know from India’s fine school of long term village studies started exactly a century ago by Gilbert Slater in what is now Tamil Nadu that the urban industrial economy feeds upon the rural one.

In some regions returns to agriculture are good, even to rice but especially to vegetables, sugar cane and high value crops. But the reasons people are migrating in droves off the land are environmental degradation, the water crisis, the encroachment of common land, the squeeze of costs and prices, the pull of higher wages in the non-farm economy and the constant need to supplement the returns from tiny smallholdings by work other than in agriculture.

Even now, a majority of villagers have agriculture as their primary source of income. So the relative neglect of agriculture by the State is something this cannot support.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Express News Service / March 07th, 2016

Engineers to pedal, push for traditional farming methods

Business & Economy, Green Initiatives/ Environment, Inspiration/ Positive News and Features, Nature

Chennai :

Two city engineers who gave up the cushy confines of their IT offices to take up farming have planned to cycle across villages of India next month, with the goal of accumulating knowledge about traditional farming methods that have lost significance since the rise of chemical farming. The second phase of the cycle expedition will see the two farmers travel through eleven countries in southeast Asia.

Vinodh Kumar, 31, and Raja S Pandian, 27, left their jobs two years ago and have since been ploughing the fields in their hometown with a focus of bringing back traditional farming.

Vinoth says, “Chemical fertilisers and pesticides have brought down the quality of farming output. We want to revive the traditional crops.” Vinoth grows millets and local vegetables like ladies’ fing er, brinjal and broad beans in his one and a half acre organic farm in Cheyyur, 90 km from Chennai.

“We were exposed to farming during our school summer holidays. After school closed, we were sent to the fields in our village where we herded cattle and spent the day under the sun in the banana plantations,” says Raja.Raja hails from Valliyur, a village near Tirunelveli, while Vinoth is from Cheyyur.

Vinodh who had worked at companies like Zoho, Standard Chartered Bank and Groupon gave up engineering when he realized his true calling.Vinoth, along with Raja, took two years off and backpacked across the villages in the country covering almost every single state. “I made more money than I had time to spend it,” says Vinoth who chose health over wealth.

“Our food habits have gotten worse. Once health deteriorates you cannot buy it back with money,” adds Vinoth who passed out of SRM Engineering College.

It then directed the owners to pay `10 lakh as compensation for causing men al agony , `3 lakh as losses suffered by Natesan, ` 35,000 as refund and `Rs 20,000 as case costs.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Chennai / by Abdullah Nurullah / March 03rd, 2016

Migrate with ease

Business & Economy, Education

Flytta, a startup by students of Hindustan University, is an online relocation portal. The idea of the company was suggested by two school students who faced a lot of problems when their parents relocated from one place to another. Started with the tagline “Migrate with Ease,” Gokulavasan Murali, chief technology officer of Flytta, and his team of developers have developed a cognitive algorithm which assists the users to be mapped to respective services of their preference. The portal currently features assistance for finding accommodation, schools, colleges, packers and movers, hospitals, food, groceries and daily needs. A relocation forum is also being developed which helps organisations, service providers and users to interact and share their relocation stories.

“Post the Chennai floods, many are slowly relocating to safer and eco-friendly zones in Chennai. This is where Flytta makes a difference and helps people,” says Rahul Kanuganti, chief operations officer.

The team includes Abhijith Ajay, business analyst; Anu.S.Menon, migration analyst; Rishab Gill, marketing analyst; Thomas Cherian, the little dev ; Sabri, business management intern; Ajjeet Verghese, smart data process intern and Dr. M. K. Badri Narayanan, associate prof., School of Management Sciences, coordinator HTBI&HEIC, Hindustan University.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Education Plus / February 29th, 2016

First Rail Auto Hub Opened in Walajabad

Business & Economy, Records, All, Science & Technologies
 Walajabad :

The country’s first rail auto hub being developed in Walajabad would flag off its first rake, which has the capacity to carry 125 cars, by the middle of this month, according to Southern Railway general manager Vashista Johri.

The hub was inaugurated by Union Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu from New Delhi through video conferencing. Top railway officials were present at the Walajabad railway station, which is located near Kancheepuram district.

Interestingly, the launch of the auto hub may sound the death knell of the facility in Thiruvallur, which is being used by Hyundai to transport its cars to Changasari in Assam. But car majors are cautious in welcoming the move by Indian Railways.  V Anand, senior general manager sales logistics, Hyundai, told Express that they need to evaluate the hub from the commercial point of view. While the hub would be useful in transporting cars to Ennore Port, which usually takes nearly 36 hours by road from the manufacturing facility, Anand feels that the cost factor still favours the road sector.

According to the railways, to move one load of six cars from the factory to the port by road, it takes 36 hours. But 300 cars can be moved to Chennai Port and Ennore Port in 2-3 hours from this facility.

However, Anand points out that the rail freight is too costly than road freight. Only if the distance is above 2,000km, rail freight service is affordable, he says. Interestingly, Hyundai, which produces 18,000 cars per annum, is using the rail to transport only four per cent of its cars and most of it is from the Melapakkam facility sector.

Aware of its limitations in NMG rakes, Indian Railways is planning to partner with APL VASCOR – a logistics specialist – which uses double decker wagons to transport the cars. One rake transports a total of 318 cars.

While the hub is being planned to cater to one million units of four-wheelers being produced per annum, the land looks inadequate and has to be developed to cater to huge containers carrying cars from the manufacturing plant. Johri is optimistic. “It is just a pilot-project. We will evaluate the first phase,” he says.

Interestingly, the initial holding capacity is for 300 cars and it is likely to be expanded to 800-1,000 cars during the second phase. Johri says that of the one million units being produced in Kancheepuram district, 3.6 lakh is being exported while the rest 6.4 lakh is transported to domestic market.

source: http://www.newindianexpresss.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Tamil Nadu / by C. Shivakumar / March 02nd, 2016