Mumbai: The country’s largest power generation equipment manufacturer Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL) has been in focus on their plans to pushing government’s ‘Make In India’ initiative. The company has plans to seek global partners who wish to manufacture in India and could emerge as an engineering R&D services provider, a contract manufacturer, or a lessor of urban-area industrial land.

ET NOW interacted with Dr. Nalin Shinghal, CMD, BHEL who said, “Atnamirbhar Bharat provides an opportunity to go back to roots. We have seen a considerable response to EoIs (Expression of Interest) by global companies. The era of a lot of Chinese power plants has declined now.”

The stock price of BHEL has rallied 100 per cent from the March lows and got a major boost from a tweet put out recently by Vedanta Resources executive chairman Anil Agarwal. Mr. Agarwal said that BHEL can produce the best power plants in the world if it is provided with full autonomy in order to cut dependency on China and move forward towards Atmanirbhar Bharat. In its endeavour to be more self-reliant, the company said they will diversify beyond power and thermal sectors. “We will grow from a power Sector Company to a global engineering organisation. The company can look to diversify into sectors like Railways, Defence, Aerospace and Oil & Gas,” said Dr. Shinghal.

With a manpower strength of about 34,000 includes 9,000 engineers, BHEL according to Dr. Shinghal will undertake diversification and a tighter focus on execution will boost business prospects. “We are looking at asset management, clean technologies in the future,” he said.

The company plans to shore up cash via realisations of outstandings and cost-cutting but acknowledged that all the efforts of cost rationalisation will take time to reflect on the bottom-line. In terms of the vision for the company, “ We want BHEL to be lean and mean, utilising capabilities as an icon of Indian industry,” said Dr. Shinghal.