Telangana plans to setup center on smart manufacturing

Hyderabad, Oct 14: The Telangana government and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) will work with Hexagon AB, an IT solutions provider, to set up a center of excellence on smart manufacturing here, an official said on Friday.

Hexagon, a Swedish firm providing technologies that drive productivity and quality across geospatial and industrial enterprise applications, will help develop the center to enable Telangana to take manufacturing to the next level of the value chain.

Jayesh Ranjan, Secretary, Industries & Commerce, and Information Technology Departments asked Hexagon to work with the state government and CII on the proposed center.

The top official on Friday visited Hexagon Capability Centre India (HCCI) here on the occasion of the launch of BLK 360 Laser Scanner.

Pramod Kaushik, President, Hexagon India, said they would also work on integrated mining solutions for the state.

He told reporters that the firm will also join hands on optic fiber cable network analysis and optimisation.

Jayesh, during his keynote address on the occasion, said the Telangana government was laying the optic fibre cable network across the state to provide broadband connectivity to all 8.5 million households in the state.

The cable will be laid along 150,000 km of pipeline to be laid for supplying drinking water to every household under the state's flagship programme 'Mission Bhagiratha'. He said this would save 70 to 80 percent of the cost of the broadband connectivity project.

Taken up under Digital Telangana initiative, the project is scheduled to be completed by the end of next year.

Pramod said Hexagon already provided solutions for analysis and optimization of the world's largest optic fiber projects.

Earlier, addressing CII's conference on manufacturing excellence, Jayesh sought the industry body's cooperation for setting up the center of excellence on smart manufacturing.

He said smart manufacturing was required to manufacture more with use of minimum resources like energy and generate less waste.

Jayesh said they would have to identify technologies which were relevant not just to the mega industries but also to medium, small and micro units which need handholding.

The official said the state would announce food processing policy in 15 to 20 days. It is also drafting an automotive policy which will also have a separate policy for electric vehicles.