Tiruchi: Taking a step forward to boost indigenous production, Defence Minister Niramala Sitharaman inaugurated the Tamil Nadu Defence Industrial Corridor on Sunday.
“The response from the local industry to this defence corridor has been amazing. They even wanted to extend this corridor up to Palakkad but we had to tell them that it would currently consist of these five nodes (cities) only,” Nirmala Sitharaman said.
The Tamilnadu Defence Industrial Corridor – also called the Tamilnadu Defence Production Quad as the nodal cities form a quadrilateral – includes Chennai, Hosur, Salem, Coimbatore and Tiruchirappalli as nodes. The idea behind setting up defence industrial corridors is to ensure connectivity among various defence industrial units.
Aforementioned five nodal cities have existing defence ecosystem in the form of OFBs (Ordnance Factory Boards), vendors working with Defence PSUs, and other allied industries. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in his Budget speech on 2 February last year, had announced that two defence industrial production corridors will be set up in the country to promote domestic defence industry.
The government has envisaged building corridors in Uttar Pradesh and Tamilnadu. On 11 August last year, Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor was launched at Aligarh with an announcement of investment of Rs 3,732 crore in defence production.