Six power equipment cos on ministry radar

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In order to meet the growing demand of power in the country, the ministry of power has identified as many as six international and domestic companies as the prospective candidates for setting up of new power equipment manufacturing facilities in India.

The global companies include Czech's Skoda Power, Italy's Ansaldo, Japanese multinational Toshiba, Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries besides the Chennai-based Cethar Vessels as also Mitsubishi and its Indian partner L&T.

These firms have been asked to make presentations at the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) headquarters in the capital on Monday and Tuesday before the high powered committee, constituted by the power ministry to decide on the pre-qualification criteria for the new manufacturing joint ventures for production of equipments with supercritical parameters.

This move will clearly pose a major competition to Bhel, which currently has the largest power equipment production base in India. Bhel is also manufacturing supercritical power equipments under technical collaboration agreements with Alstom of France and Siemens of Germany.

Power ministry sources revealed that as against the typical JV approach of one Indian and one foreign partner, there could also be other business arrangements like having a fully owned subsidiary of foreign manufacturers or even multi-partner JVs which could be pose as business arrangements for undertaking manufacturing in India.

The committee in its first meeting, held so far, has agreed that the two partners JV is only one of the arrangements and all other types of arrangements are required to be considered to devise suitable technical and financial criteria for the partners of the JV.

Another significant area being looked into by the power ministry's committee relates to the constraints in setting up manufacturing bases and also the most critical issue of technology transfer. The committee is also in the process of evolving an indigenisation mechanism for ensuring a smooth technology transfer flow from the foreign manufacturer to the Indian JV partner.

It is worthwhile to mention here that the German-based technology partner of Bhel for manufacturing supercritical sets-Siemens has expressed serious concerns over the progress of its technology transfer and collaboration agreement with Bhel for 1,000 mw sets.