BrahMos cruise missile manufacturing unit to be set up between Lucknow and Jhansi: Report

NEW DELHI: BrahMos, the supersonic cruise missile which is being jointly developed by India and Russia, will be manufactured in the Lucknow node of the Uttar Pradesh Defence Corridor soon.

According to reports, the manufacturing unit for the BrahMos missiles will be set up between Lucknow, Kanpur and Jhansi with an investment of Rs 300 crore. The BrahMos project will provide indirect employment to around 5,000 people and nearly 10,000 will get work through the production centres.

BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture (JV) of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) of India and NPO Mashinostroeyenia (NPOM) of Russia, has proposed the setting up of a modern manufacturing facility near Lucknow to the Uttar Pradesh government.

A top-level delegation of BrahMos Aerospace led by the director-general of BrahMos Sudhir K Mishra had earlier met UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and discussed the proposal to set a major manufacturing facility for production and supply of various systems and sub-systems for next-generation missile systems.

Mishra also forwarded a letter to UP Expressway Industrial Development Authority (UPEIDA) CEO and Additional Chief Secretary (home) Awanish Awasthi seeking 200-acre land for the project under the Defence Corridor for making the BrahMos missile.

The Uttar Pradesh government has also given indications that the production unit for the next-generation state-of-the-art BrahMos missiles will most likely come up in the Defence Corridor in Lucknow.

Besides the BrahMos missile manufacturing, research and development work will also be done in these units. More than 100 BrahMos missiles are planned to be built in the next three years.

In January 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the creation of a Defence Corridor in UP during an investors' summit. The UP government also later said that it was setting up defence corridors at Lucknow, Kanpur, Chitrakoot, Jhansi, Agra, and Aligarh nodes.

In the last three years, over 65 big companies have requested the government to provide land in the Defence Industrial Corridor to set up their factories, of which around 19 big companies have been allotted 55.4 hectares of land by the UPEIDA recently.

BrahMos Supersonic Cruise Missile is a state-of-the-art cruise missile that is designed, developed and produced by BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Russia's NPO Mashinostroeyenia. The next-generation supersonic cruise missile is based on the technology of Russia's P-800 Oniks cruise missile.