GE to hire engineers for R and D jobs in India

General Electric (GE) will make an additional investment of $60 million in its technology centre in Bangalore over the next three years and take the headcount in the centre to 5,000 by the end of this financial year. The centre currently has over 4,500 people doing cutting edge research and development in areas like energy, healthcare and aviation and is GE's largest integrated multidisciplinary R&D centre outside the US. 

The $147-billion company's MD for the India technology centre, Gopichand Katragadda, said here on Thursday that new hiring would focus on senior level positions to further deepen the technological strength of the centre. "We have what we call chief engineers, who are people who finally clear designs of products, and principal engineers who support the chief engineers. We will increase the numbers of these engineers," he said. There is one chief engineer each for aviation and energy in India now; globally, GE has 15 in aviation and 20-25 in energy. 

Over the past two years, the centre has developed some 30 products for the Indian market, notably low wind turbines, air circuit breakers, portable ECG machines, and maternal-infant care products like baby warmers. In many of these, the focus has been on keeping costs down through frugal engineering. "The products developed here now account for 10% of our India revenue," Katragadda said. GE does not disclose country specific revenue. 

The target is to add another 30 products by 2015. The focus on energy and healthcare products will continue and GE plans to add sensing, locomotive and signaling products, the last two if it wins the bid for the Indian Railways' upcoming order for locomotives. 

Katragadda said more of the R&D hiring in the coming years would happen at its Hyderabad and Pune facilities. Hyderabad already has about 1,000 employees. In Pune, the company is establishing a manufacturing plant at a cost of $200 million - to manufacture a range of products including wind turbines, sensing products, gas engine components and aviation components. The plant will be operational in the third quarter of 2013. Katragadda plans to co-locate an R&D facility there. 

GE's 12-year-old R&D operation in India has filed 1,850 patent applications, of which over 350 have been granted. More than 800 of the filings have happened in just 2011 and 2012. "Earlier only our research staff were filing patents, now our engineering teams too are doing it, so the numbers have risen sharply. Our per capita patent filings are as good as any of our other global centre," Katragadda said. 

For GE's global operations, India has done work in areas such as wind micrositing - helping choose the type of wind turbine to use and its exact position in a wind farm; improving fuel efficiency in locomotives - by understanding signaling conditions and when to accelerate, brake; plant optimization; and healthcare imaging. 

Katragadda said future work will focus on building all-glass wind turbines (glass is cheaper than the alloys that are used now), biomass gasification, wind-solar hybrid systems (enables solar to be used during day and wind at night), improving rural water (there is a lot of arsenic in water now), and ultrasound machines that would automate foetal measurement and reporting so that they could be used by untrained people.