NewsX was recently joined by Raj Chodankar, Chairman & CEO, Rrps4e Innovation Pvt Ltd for a candid conversation with in its special series, NewsX India A-List.
Raj kickstarted the conversation by sharing insights from his experience in the electro-optics and healthcare industry. He said, “Our journey actually commenced in the year, 1990, that’s when we first ventured into doing some sort of business in India, but, the real assignment that we took up was in 2001 when we built up a very unique nano-machining facility, one of its kind in India, which catered specifically to the nuclear fraternity. So, that was the platform which took us into electro-optics because most of the optical elements that go into an electro-optics need the nano-machining setup and that’s where our journey began in 2010-12.”
He further added, “2014 was when we did a really good job for the Indian army as an outside partner with an Israeli company where we built all the optical elements for thermal imaging fire control system which gets mounted on a tank that is where we started getting recognition and our journey then progressed into trying to offer complete products rather than only components because there was a lot of value addition in the products.”
Throwing some light on their journey further, Raj expressed, “We got very prominent in 2018-19 and we were recognised well. 2020 was the time when we diversified into healthcare and it was only because of the challenges that the entire world was facing due to the pandemic. Because we had this thermal core technology which was the base, we used that thermal core technology to build thermal scanners for fever detection and then we use this thermal camera jointly with a Japanese company.”
Further talking about their collaborative projects in India and PM’s Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, he said, “The era of making India Atmanirbhar is something that has always encouraged us and it continues to encourage us, or else life was very difficult for any entrepreneur to display his skills or innovation because at the end of the day we have to remember that if we are going into some niche technologies or products that go into Indian army, it is very important that these products go through some extensive trials and these trials by default can be anything between 1.5 to 3 years. The use of the Atmanirbhar plan under Make In India plan allowed us to buy technologies from global companies which made the buyers life much more simpler because it was a proven technology, and, we could then display our skills because the global technology provider will allow us to build 50 per cent of those modules or components in India which we call as the indigenously designed, developed and manufactured in India, the IDDM category.”
Towards the end of conversation, Raj shared about their global tie-ups. He stated, “After this Atmanirbhar setup, we got a lot of opportunities from global companies that wanted to partner with somebody who is already a part of the ongoing technologies and which is where we got an upper hand over the others. Not that we are of corporate level, we are just getting into corporate zones. We are doing really well, our growth pattern is going into constant jumps.”