In a move that would boost indigenous production besides bringing in jobs and investment to the State, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman inaugurated the Tamilnadu Defence Industrial Corridor in Tiruchi Sunday. The ambitious project, also called the Tamilnadu Defence Production Quad, forms a quadrilateral that includes Chennai, Hosur, Salem, Coimbatore and Tiruchi as nodes. The idea behind setting up defence industrial corridors is to ensure connectivity among various defence industrial units.
The 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 2 February last year, had announced that two defence industrial production corridors will be set up in the country to promote the 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. And now, the Tamilnadu Defence Corridor has been launched and it is expected that Rs 4,000-crore-worth investments will be made.
According to Nirmala, “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 only.” Secretary, Defence Production, Ajay Kumar, said, “Tamilnadu will be very good for aero-components due to its auto expertise and proximity to Bengaluru.” Several companies based out of Tamilnadu, including big firms and MSMEs that either manufacture defence equipment or are ready to begin production, are to benefit from the initiative. Since this will be bringing jobs and investment, the economy of Tamilnadu is also expected to thrive.