Tag Archives: aerospace skilling in bangalore

He is at ease designing musical instruments and missile launchers

A musician credited with inventing the electronic tambura and electronic tabla, G. Raj Narayan may seem to be an odd man out at a seminar on military hardware and electronic warfare.

But Raj, as he is popularly called, is not only at ease with both the fields but is among the lead panellist, given his foray into defence and aerospace, involving manufacture of military-grade weapons for the Indian defence establishment.

A former design engineer at Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. in Bengaluru, Mr. Raj Narayan, who has a master’s degree in electronics from IIT Madras, has a passion for Carnatic music and was a regular on AIR and Doordarshan till 10 years ago before he decided to strike it out as an entrepreneur in aerospace and defence equipment manufacturing.

Given his background in HAL and experience of working on platforms ranging from Gnat to MIG and Jaguar, Mr. Raj Narayan floated Radel Group, a precision engineering group in Bengaluru, which now develops components for the fighter aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF).

May seem hi-tech for the uninitiated but not for Mr. Raj Narayan who said the design and circuitry involved in making a digital musical instrument or military equipment were the same. Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the Indian Science Congress, Mr. Raj Narayan said, “My exposure to electronics and miniaturisation as a designer in HAL enabled me to design circuits for musical instruments”.

Mr. Raj Narayan, who was part of the team that built India’s first indigenous cockpit simulator, also invented the electronic tabla and electronic veena, and mass produced them for the music industry. The music unit grew and supported his venture back into aerospace in 2005; the two companies are located in the same building in Bengaluru, and what is more, they have the same employees.

Today a design engineer may be working on a musical instrument, tomorrow he may work on ammunition firing equipment of an aircraft. “That is the beauty of the whole exercise as the process of electronic design and packaging is the same but the only difference is that defence products have to be conceived and designed at a higher level than for a consumer product,” said Mr. Raj Narayan.

The musician, who received the Karnataka Kalashree award in 2001, recently innovated a missile launcher for the Jaguar based on the latest micro-controller technology to replace obsolete circuits and it has been cleared for induction by the IAF.

The original article appeared on The Hindu.

MSMEs should scale up their capabilities

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Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises will have to scale up their capabilities to design and manufacture parts, sub-assemblies as well as complete products which requires a wide variety of skills, said G Raj Narayan, founder and MD Radel Group and Chief Mentor of Drona.

Speaking at a Plenary Session at the 103rd Indian Science Congress on Aims to focus on the Make In India initiative with particular reference to the Defence and Aerospace sector’, he said that MSMEs in India contribute more than 45 per cent of the industrial output and hence constitute a large section of the manufacturing chains of almost all products. He said that ‘Make in India’ opens up far more opportunities of raising their value proposition than being mere vendors to the large DPSUs.

Considering that less than 10 per cent of the engineers churned out of Indian colleges are found to be employable in the core engineering industries, imparting practical skills is the need of the hour for MII to succeed.
Institutions such as the Drona School of Engineering Practice, which orients engineers to practical hands-on exposure to high value engineering skills in an industrial environment, are the way forward.
The ‘Make in India’ is a paradigm shift from the past two decades of Indian obsession with IT and ITeS services during which manufacturing industries were allowed to collapse.

There appears to be a new found realization of the benefits of manufacturing A&D products in India for domestic consumption rather than import them.
However, ‘Make in India’ goes beyond just manufacturing, to design, innovate, manufacture and support in India.
Viewed holistically, this has profound implications across a wide section of businesses.
It involves huge numbers of creative engineers, technicians, professors, research scholars, sales, marketing and support staff, etc.
all of whom need to possess specialized skills, he added.

The original article appeared on UniIndia.

A&D Sector Needs 18,000 Trained Engineers

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The original article appeared on Mydigitalfc

With India aiming to be a self-reliant manufacturer and exporter of defence products, the number of required trained engineer in the aerospace and defence (A&D) sector is expected to grow at least four folds.

“Based on a very conservative figure of even three engineers per MSME (taking into account the micro as well as small units), there is an immediate need today for approximately 18,000 trained engineers in this sector. However, it is imperative that the A&D sector grows four-fold to make India not only self-reliant but an exporter of defence products. The projected requirement of trained (not just qualified) engineers would then jump to 72,000 or more over the next few years,” G Raj Narayan, founder managing director of the Bangalore-based Radel Group, told FC.

To meet this large requirement, the Bangalore-based group, whose Arm- Radel Advanced technology is a design and manufacturing company promoted by technocrats with four decades of experience in the aerospace, defence and electronics industry, has now come up with DRONA School of Engineering Practice, the first of its kind finishing school in the country focuses on creating skilled engineers, especially for the electronics, aerospace and defence sectors.

DRONA offers courses ranging from the flagship holistic six-month programme, Campus2Career Apprenticeship, to short three-day orientation programmes of aerospace, defence and electronics sectors.

“We are expecting a four-fold increase in the number of students over the next couple of years. We are also gearing up to team up with leading educational institutions across the country and provide customised training for industries for their new recruits,” said Narayan.

Significantly, a recent industry study suggested that even a 20 to 25 per cent reduction in imports could directly create an additional one lakh or more of highly skilled jobs in India. If the government strives to extend the indigenous content to 70 per cent in the next few years, then this figure can swell even further.

Narayan said that with the emphasis now on ‘make in India’ and with thrust on defence indigenisation, there is need for a quantum jump in the number of competent industries entering this sector. To meet the projected targets, large organisations such as the defence PSUs have no option but to create an efficient supply chain through the participation of MSMEs. MSMEs contribute significantly to employment generation. It is reported that more than 6,000 MSMEs are already integrated into the A&D sector as suppliers mainly to PSUs and this number is growing.

Import Of Aircraft Spares – Is This ‘Make In India’?

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There has been a news item in the last two days on HAL signing an MOU with BAe, UK, for spares support for the Hawk trainer as well as the Jaguar. If we hark back 40 years, HAL manufactured the Jaguar under licence from BAe. Logically, over these 4 decades, HAL should have developed indigenous sources for the spares for these aircraft. It has obviously not happened. This is a classic example of the myth of ‘Transfer of Technology’. Many questions therefore arise from the announcement of this MoU.

What is the penalty that the country (and its tax paying public) paid with its precious foreign exchange for the maintenance and overhaul of these Jaguar aircraft over all these years? For, the OEM has surely charged HAL and the IAF exorbitantly for each spare part.

Did HAL attempt indigenisation of critical spares of Jaguar over these four decades? If so, what were the reasons for going back to BAe for spares? There was enough time for HAL to indigenise hundreds of spares that could also have enabled Indian vendors to develop similar parts and equipment for the LCA, ALH, Mirage and others. If all the divisions of HAL, at Bangalore, Lucknow, Korwa and Hyderabad could not indigenise the parts, why could it not have at least contracted it to a private player, even MSMEs? Radel Advanced Technology, an MSME has successfully indigenised many equipment including for the Jaguar, at a fraction of the cost of imported ones. So the question is, has HAL failed in skilling its engineers in indigenisation, or has it failed to give enough importance to the issue?

When on the one hand, the Government talks of ‘Make in India’ and on the other, a prestigious defence PSU actually signs an MOU for spares support for a 40-year old aircraft, it becomes clear that there is either a lack of capability or a lack of will to indigenise, design and manufacture in India.

Under these circumstances, how can we claim that we have produced an ‘indigenous’ LCA? This raises an even more worrying thought – were we fooling ourselves by wanting to make the Rafale in India? Even if we do, under licence, will we not be in the same boat as we are with the Jaguar and the Hawk today? Doesn’t this MOU prove that HAL has failed to assimilate even 40 year old technology over all these years?

Looking ahead, how do we develop the capability to design and manufacture aircraft that are completely indigenous?

The solution lies in taking multiple steps:

To begin with, the determination and will to design and produce an indigenous aircraft as well as all its on-board systems, over a limited time frame.

Ensuring that the supply chain for the manufacture of the complete platform is in the ratio of 80:20 where 80 is the share of the tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers, and the lead organisation retains only 20% – the important major part of integration, testing and delivery.

Steps to indigenise all spares for all the aircraft concurrently with the aircraft manufacturing programme, through the process of identifying and promoting MSMEs as suppliers for these – in this process, streamlining and expediting the lengthy and often infructuous tendering process, with the specific intention of achieving the stated goal.

A strong leadership within the PSU to take these steps forward and drive it down the whole organisation. With the right attitude and determination, we can do it. If we can indigenously design and execute the Mars Mission, we can design our own fighter aircraft too.

Shortage of Skilled Engineers Threatens to Ground Make In India flight.

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The recent launch of Drona, School of Engineering Practice, included a lively panel discussion on the issue of skilling engineers for ‘Make in India. This was reported in OneIndia. Here is an extract: While launching the Drona School of Engineering Practice, spearheaded by aerospace veteran G Raj Narayan of Radel Group in Bengaluru recently, experts shared some crucial facts.

Some of the facts have been mentioned here:

About 1.5 million engineers graduated from more than 3500 engineering colleges across India in 2014.

Only 4 to 7 per cent of engineers are actually fit for jobs in the core engineering sectors.

Graduates seem to lack higher-order thinking skills, analyzing, evaluating and creating.

Huge demand from core engineering industries for practical engineers with hands on experience.

Sunrise industries of Aerospace, Defence and Electronics need thousands of skilled engineers for design as well as manufacturing.

Very few training schools for engineers in core engineering disciplines, especially electronics and aerospace engineering design.

None possesses robust processes, documentation and project management.

Practicing engineers need of the hour

Speaking to One India on the occasion, Narayan said that Drona is a logical solution to his four-decade-plus experience as an entrepreneur. “What we need today is practicing engineers. We are offering a holistic exposure to engineering.

In the aerospace and defence sector, there are very few schools in India to prepare engineers to get ready for the opportunity of Make in India,” Narayan said. Cleared by the Centre for Military Airworthiness Certification (CEMILAC), Radel has been offering system design, CAD/CAM services, design and development of airborne and ground support equipment, documentation support, development of LRUs, ground test equipment and obsolescence management for aerospace, defense and related OEM industries.

The delivering unit that fires rockets on Jaguar fighter is one of the many projects the company has executed. It has also contributed for programmes like the Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) Dhruv, Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas and Sukhoi (Su-30 MKI). “The Make in India vision of Prime Minister Modi is a welcome move and it will re-write the research, development and manufacturing concepts in the country. But for Make in India’s success, we need skilled and smart engineers.

A holistic exposure to engineering is the key,” says Raj Narayan. Skill the nation and not kill the nation: Vidyashankar M N Vidyashankar, President, India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA), said that India will have to create over 120 million jobs in the near future. “Make in India is the key, but adding engineers into the market without empowering them is dangerous.

If we don’t skill the nation, we are going to kill the nation,” Vidyashankar, a retired IAS officer who had served with the Karnataka government said. Citing a global study, Vidyashankar said that by 2020, if India’s doesn’t take care of the echo system in the electronic segment, then it would overtake the crude oil import.

Unique features of Mission Drona

Promises to create skilled engineers in the fields of electronics, aviation, and aerospace and defence sectors.
Offers a unique Apprenternship (Apprentice-Intern) programme providing fresh engineers with training in design and manufacturing, with mentoring from veterans from the industry.
Trainees are provided with hands-on work experience and exposure to live projects.
A six-month project related ‘Campus2Career’ holistic programme includes training in soft skills.
Other courses offered are a short 3-week course and 3-day introductory workshops on current technology topics.

Job-Ready From Day One

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The original article appeared in The Statesman

About 1.5 million engineers graduated from more than 3,500 engineering colleges across India in 2014, but how many of them are really employable in the core industries?

One of the studies (Aspiring Minds, Report 2014) says that only a shocking four to seven per cent of them are actually fit for jobs in the core engineering sectors. An earlier study by the World Bank (2010) showed that employers were not satisfied with the fresh engineering graduates they recruited. Graduates seemed to lack higher order thinking skills: analysing, evaluating and creating.

It is this gap between the existing education system and the actual industry requirement that needs to be met. The sunrise industries of aerospace, defence and electronics need thousands of skilled engineers for design as well as manufacture. Today, while we find many training institutes for software, even computer hardware and networking, there are very few training schools for engineers in core disciplines, especially electronics and aerospace engineering design, and none that include robust processes, documentation and project management.

Currently, the Radel Group has embarked on a novel initiative for the engineering fraternity aimed at mentoring and training them in a real industrial environment on live projects to make them industry-ready. The Drona School of Engineering Practice is a timely and unique initiative that focuses on creating skilled engineers, especially for the electronics, aerospace and defence sectors.

There are several areas where the “Apprenternship” programme offered by Drona differs from other training programmes. The most important one is the mentorship provided by veterans of industry and personal guidance from one of the most respected inventors of India. Another key differentiator is the hands-on work experience and exposure to live projects. The student gets an insight into the design and development cycle of defence and aerospace systems that meet global industry standards of performance, reliability and efficiency. The graduate is trained in systematic quality analysis and documentation processes that are essential for a manufacturing industry, especially in the A&D sector.

The “Apprentern” is provided soft-skills training and a working knowledge of how an industry operates. A fresh engineering graduate who opts for the Drona programme at Radel goes through a complete transformation of his/her thought process, through which critical, analytical and innovative skills blossom.

Training is provided in written and oral communication skills, business etiquette and time management. The engineer emerges at the end of the course as a confident and competent young and dynamic professional, with enhanced communication skills — in effect, industry-ready. Every industrialist is aware of the time, cost and effort of training fresh engineers. In most organisations, the first few months are spent in training new recruits, with literally no output. The Drona programme takes on the initial training effort of the industry and provides the employer with a trained engineer, ready for the job, so that the employer gets productivity from the new engineer right from day one.

The intensive six-month holistic programme, “Campus2Career”, offers several skilling programmes in embedded systems, avionics, electronics design and related domains comprising all aspects that are required to make a fresh engineer job-ready. The aspiring trainee can select from a variety of subject modules that have combinations of embedded software, embedded electronics design, avionics, mechanical Cad and PCB designs, technical documentation and project management, apart from a basic introduction to various facets of industry (production, planning, admin, HR, etc) and, importantly, soft skills such as verbal and written communication, time management and business etiquette.

The first session of Drona’s “Campus2Career” starts from 1 July 2015.

Creating a generation of Design Engineers for Make In India

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Core engineering skill is what every employer in an engineering industry looks for, in a fresh engineering graduate. Most freshers applying for jobs in this sector however, falter at the very first step – the screening test. Many cannot answer even the simplest high-school level question in physics or mathematics. Those that clear this small hurdle, fall at the next – the interview. Again, simple questions stump them. Yet, when questioned about the details, they are not able to explain anything.

Finally most of them admit that the project work was just bought out from small institutions or individuals who make a business out of it. The candidate who is finally hired by the company needs extensive training for 3 to 6 months, before any useful work is produced. Till then, there is zero output from the new employee. This story is true for many engineering industries. This is the kind of talent gap that they face.

As is well-known, the root cause for this is the over-emphasis of our education system, even at the undergraduate level, on rote-learning and theory, at the expense of practical application. Ultimately, this is counterproductive, because an engineer is basically one who has to apply theoretical principles in practice.

Tweet this:“While skilling the technician is important, creating a new generation of product designers is imperative”.

So, what is the solution? The student is helpless, as he is a prisoner of the system. So too are the teachers. It is not easy to overhaul the engineering education system, but solutions have to be found, to unlock the potential of these ‘rough diamonds’ – our engineering graduates, so that our goal of self-reliance in manufacturing through ‘Make in India’ can be achieved.

‘Make in India’ is about manufacturing our own products with IPRs owned by Indian companies. It is not about just manufacturing foreign products ‘under license’. Not long ago, we had Indian companies manufacturing ‘Indian TVs’ with component kits imported from abroad. But now, you have Korean and Japanese brands selling their TVs in India, but almost completely manufactured in China. Hence, the need of the hour is for Indian companies to learn to design and manufacture our own products.

So, how do we create a generation of design engineers that can produce innovative new products? Engineering students need to learn the practical application of each theoretical concept, and need inputs on multiple aspects related to the design and manufacture of even the simplest equipment. The very process of thinking, conceptualization, and designing elegant, reliable, rugged and power efficient products, whether in embedded software or electronic hardware, how to ‘marry’ the two, and adopting a well-documented design process, making sure that every aspect of the product life cycle is covered.

While these concepts can be explained at brief workshops, it is only through actual hands-on work on a live project that a student or fresh engineer can learn and understand the practical implications of each of them.

While skilling the technician is important, creating a new generation of product designers is imperative. Only this can ensure a sustainable and meaningful ‘Make in India’. Radel’s new venture ‘Drona School of Engineering practice’ does precisely this.

Make In India – But who will skill our Engineering Graduates?

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The USD 400 billion opportunity

The catch-phrase today in Indian Industry is ‘Make in India’. The estimated domestic demand for Electronics products alone, is of the order of USD 400 billion by 2020. Every entrepreneur in the manufacturing sector is aspiring to take a slice of this pie.

The Challenges

However, if Make in India is to become a reality, there has to be a focus on the product manufacturing sector. China today, is a giant economic power, because it is a manufacturing hub for almost everything across the globe. Unless we are self-sufficient in Manufacturing, we can never hope to match, leave alone overtake, our neighbour.To achieve this, as has been highlighted by many experts, several areas need urgent attention – such as our infrastructure, labour laws and tax laws. But by far the most important initiative needed is in making our engineers employable. This is the greatest hurdle in the realisation of the goal of ‘Make in India’. Without competent engineers to drive the programme, how can the campaign even take off? How will we create our own products?

One step further – from Make in India to Design in India

In the Aerospace and Defence sector, how will India transform from being one of the largest importers of defence equipment, into being self-sufficient in defence products and then onwards to become an exporter? We need to make our engineering graduates skilled not only in Manufacturing but in Design.

Tweet this: We need to not just Make in India, but Create in India, Design in India and Innovate in India, so as to create and own all the intellectual property ourselves.

For this, we need to skill our engineers not just as computer operators but as intelligent designers and engineers in practice.

Why do we need to skill engineers?

There has been a lot of emphasis of late, on ‘Skilling India’. Most of the initiatives under this program are focused on skilling the workforce at the technician level – electrician, machine operator, etc. There is no recognition of the crying need for our fresh engineering graduates to be made job-ready with hard-core engineering domain skills. Reports suggest that out of about 1.5 million engineers graduating from more than 3500 engineering colleges across India in 2014, only a shocking 4 to 7 % of engineers are actually fit for jobs in the core engineering sectors.

Tweet this: Studies also indicate that employers are not satisfied with the fresh graduates they recruit, and that ‘Graduates seem to lack higher-order thinking skills (analyzing, evaluating and creating)’.

There is a huge demand from the core engineering industries for practical engineers who have hands-on experience. We need to close this large gap between the existing education system and the actual industry requirement.

Today, while we find many training institutes for software, even computer hardware (assembly & troubleshooting) and networking, there are very few training schools for engineers in core engineering disciplines, especially Electronics and Aerospace Engineering Design, and none that include robust processes, documentation and project management. Industries spend several months training them on these essential skills.

In view of the need faced by Engineering students and the Indian Manufacturing Industry, Radel (a well-known name in the Aerospace and Consumer Electronics sectors) has embarked on a novel initiative – Drona, school for engineering practice, that mentors and trains graduates and fresh industry recruits in a real industrial environment with exposure to exciting live projects, to make them industry-ready.

How do you integrate SMEs into the Indian Aerospace and Defence ecosystem?

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Let me ask a question myself, what is an ecosystem? The ecosystem is one that encourages the growth of a particular sector of industry or product. So the ecosystem includes either the creation or existence of the infrastructure which includes again for design and manufacture, the manpower trained to handle the technologies involved, facility for training the manpower, test facilities, certification, processes, a supply chain, availability of specialised raw materials if there are any, and so on – it can be expanded without much of a limit. So the ecosystem as applied to the aerospace and defence includes the inclusion of all these parameters. And with particular reference to the aerospace sector which uses very specialised aluminium alloys, titanium alloys, rivets, nuts and screws that needs to be of special grade or tested grade and certified as airworthy. Now if we don’t have any of these present within the country, then the ecosystem is missing. Even in the case of availability of trained engineering manpower, we don’t have the ecosystem where you have either aerospace engineers or mechanical engineers trained for working or operating in the aerospace sector. So we don’t have the availability of these various kinds of resources in the country and therefore the aerospace and defence sector in the country is unable to grow to the extent that it needs to grow. This is where the creation of ecosystem is extremely important and therefore the Government is the one that needs to address these by setting up of laboratories, test facilities, training institutes or may be even incentivising SMEs or large organisations to conduct training programmes, seminars, workshops etc etc. And this is where the Government has to play a very major role in incentivising and facilitating the growth of the aerospace and defence sector in this country.

Is ‘Technology Transfer’ required for Indian Industries to succeed in MakeInIndia?

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I am one of those who believe that we do not need any transfer of technology at all. In the past we had transfer of technology as part of projects that we got from British, Russian the French and many other countries. These were for the licensed manufacture of aircraft, transport aircraft, fighter aircraft, battle tanks and trucks, for example Tatra. But then we have not taken the additional steps of extracting information and knowledge that we have got, that we have paid for, and then taking the next few steps to develop them and create our own technologies. There is no rocket technology or rocket science involved in routine equipment, be it a communication equipment, navigation equipment or power plant.

The only area where there is high tech science involved is in the design and manufacture of advanced jet engines that are required for a jet aircraft. If you leave that aside, all the other equipment and systems that go on board on aircraft or battle tank are available with us. If we have been able to put satellite around Mars or If we have been able to land a satellite on to the surface of the moon then what is it we lack?

It is only the question of applying the science that we learned, and designing our own products, trying them out, if there have been deficiencies, use the knowledge gained and improve upon it, and then reach the ultimate goal of having our own equipment, systems as well as the platforms. This is what we need to do and there is absolutely no need for us to go out of this country seeking transfer of technology. After all, what is the technology we receive from abroad? They are only manufacturing technology for manufacture of an aircraft or its shell and stuffing it with equipment then that are imported from abroad. So we need to develop the equipment and systems that go on to the shell, and thereby increase the indigenous content of our platforms rather than go out again and get the technology for manufacturing of the shell, be it a 4th generation or 5th generation aircraft or battle tank. We need to look inwards and get the technology that is available within ourselves whether it is in our educational institutions or in R&D labs, for the manufacturing establishment. All we need to do is put our heads and hands together to solve our own problems.