UP Defence Corridor: Construction Of BrahMos Missile Unit In Lucknow To Begin In October

The construction of the BrahMos missile unit in Lucknow will begin in October this year, Awanish Awasthi, the Chief Executive Officer of Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA), the nodal agency for the Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor, has said.

Awasthi told News18 that the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) would grant clearances for the project by September this year. The UPEIDA CEO also stated that the state government had allotted 80 hectares of land for the Rs 3000 project at a nominal cost, and around 50 per cent work of the boundary work is complete.

“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,” News18 quoted Awasthi saying.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, a Member of Parliament from Lucknow, laid the foundation stone for the BrahMos unit in December last year.

The News18 report says that the Lucknow unit will manufacture next-generation BrahMos missiles, also called BrahMos (NG). Over 100 BrahMos missiles will be manufactured by the unit in the next three years.

UP Defence Corridor

The defence corridor in Uttar Pradesh, announced in 2018, has six nodes — Aligarh, Agra, Lucknow, Kanpur, Chitrakoot and Jhansi. The state government has acquired around 1,600 hectares of land in these nodes.

“Lucknow node is seeing fast activity and Aligarh node is sold out. Kanpur node we are expecting big investments and Jhansi we have for BDL and others are also coming,” News18 quoted Awasthi as saying.

Uttar Pradesh already has three Hindustan Aeronautics Limited manufacturing units, nine Ordnance Factories, Bharat Electronics Limited and other state-owned companies that are part of the defence sector.

Most of these plants are in Lucknow, Kanpur and the adjoining regions, within a 300-350 km radius of Bundelkhand.

In recent years, Kanpur has attracted investment in defence manufacturing from the private sector. Recently, the Lohia Group invested nearly Rs 100 crore in a greenfield aerospace and defence hardware plant in Kanpur.

MKU, a defence manufacturing firm headquartered in Kanpur, has been supplying equipment to the Indian Army since the last 1980s and, more recently, to militaries, paramilitaries and police services in other countries.

Among other things, the company is manufacturing ballistic helmets for the Indian Army at its unit Malwan in Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur district, a 40-minute drive from Kanpur and a little over 130 km away from Chitrakoot, one of the six nodes of the corridor.

The existing defence manufacturing ecosystem in Uttar Pradesh can be leveraged to attract new investment in this sector.

As land costs rise in the existing industrial hubs such as Lucknow and Kanpur, Bundelkhand can emerge as a new destination for investment in defence manufacturing. Two of the six nodes of the corridor — Jhansi and Chitrakoot — are in Bundelkhand. The improvement in connectivity within the region and between the nodes of the Defence Corridor with the operationalisation of the Bundelkhand Expressway will add to the advantage of low-cost labour and land in this region.