The BrahMos unit in Lucknow will be the “centrepiece” of the Defence Corridor Project in Uttar Pradesh and work will begin on the mega unit in October, according to Awanish K Awasthi, the Additional Chief Secretary of Uttar Pradesh.
India will manufacture its next-generation BrahMos (BrahMos-NG) at this unit and Rs 3,000 crore has been committed as investment for the project by BrahMos Aerospace, the joint venture of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) of India and NPO Mashinostroeyenia of Russia. Rs 1,500 crore of investment will come in phase one and more than 100 BrahMos missiles will be manufactured here in the next three years.
Awasthi said UP has been assured that all clearances will come from the DRDO for the project by September and construction of the unit will begin by October. “We have allotted 80 hectares of land at a nominal cost and the joint venture has taken possession of the land; 50 per cent of the boundary work is also complete. They have now planned bigger than what they had originally planned,” Awasthi said.
The Additional Chief Secretary said the BrahMos Unit will be the “centre of the production which will make the main difference” in the upcoming Defence Corridor in UP. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh laid the foundation stone of BrahMos Missile set-up in Lucknow on December 26 last year. Another key project in the Defence Corridor is establishing a state of the art common Defence Testing Infrastructure under the scheme promoted by Ministry of Defence, Awasthi said.
The Defence Industrial Corridor in Uttar Pradesh is planned to be established in six nodes across the state in as many districts and till date, a total of 93 industrial and institutional MoUs have been signed with various private investors and organisations with an estimated investment value of over 11,256 crore, the UP government says. The maximum number of MoUs (35) have been signed for the Aligarh node, followed by 15 in Lucknow node, 12 in Kanpur node and nine in Jhansi.
