Tamil Nadu Defence Corridor Gets Going: L&T Sets Up Missile Factory In Partnership With European Defence Major MBDA  

L&T on Monday (3 February) announced that it has set up a missile integration facility at a special economic zone in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore in collaboration with European defence major MBDA Missile Systems, Economic Times has reported.

The L&T-MBDA joint venture known as LTMMSL has set up the "assembly, inert integration and testing facility for missile sub-systems and missile weapon launch systems" in a plant spread across 16,000 square metres.

As part of the inert process, the missiles are integrated without adding the explosive component.

LTMMSL is a joint venture between L&T which owns 51 per cent of the stake and MBDA which owns the rest 49 per cent. It has already received a few export orders and will begin delivering the defence equipment from 2020. It eventually hopes to offer advanced missile systems to the Indian Armed Forces.

The Tamil Nadu Defence Industrial Corridor was formally launched by erstwhile defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman last year and became the second such corridor in India.

The corridor developed over the existing defence ecosystem in the state has six nodes in Trichy, Salem, Hosur, Coimbatore, Madurai as well as Chennai.

Coimbatore was chosen as the defence innovation hub as it already had a thriving ecosystem of large number of micro, medium and small enterprises.

In the city, as many as 200 enterprises are vying for lucrative defence contracts from large manufacturers, and some have already lined up few deals. Among the early starters are CRI Pumps (supplies to the Indian Navy) and Shanthi Gears, a part of the Rs 32,900 crore Murugappa Group, which makes gearboxes for battle tanks.