Setting trends: From having a unit locally to being country’s largest manufacturer of weighbridges, he’s come a long way

Neeraj Bagga

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, July 5

Instrumental in turning his local unit into country’s most sought after and largest manufacturer of weighbridges, Harwinder Singh never thought of moving out of the holy city for his love for local food and culture.

All these years, he never planned shifting his manufacturing centre to the eastern part of the country, which has resources (steel) needed to manufacture weighbridges. However, things are now getting out of hand. A weighbridge normally weighs 10 tonnes and its raw material — steel — comes from West Bengal, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.

Due to transportation and logistics problems, his company has to shell out Rs80,000 more on each weighbridge being manufactured at the local unit. Now, his company is in the process of buying a piece of land in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur to set up a fabrication plant there.

Harvinder, while recalling his journey, said he had started the vocation by manufacturing mechanical weighbridges with a sum of Rs35,000 in 1982. Realising the marketing trend, his company switched over to manufacturing electronic weighbridges in 1995. For gaining technical know-how, his company took expertise from a Japanese company as well.

“We switched over to manufacturing electronic weighbridges by getting technical wherewithal from a Japanese company and gradually developing our own engineering wing,” he said. Soon, his concern was manufacturing in-house Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) for weighing systems. Earlier, they used to import the PCBs from other countries. PCBs convert the analog signals into digital.

His companies with an annual turnover of Rs68 crore have clocked three times more exports in the first quarter of this fiscal in comparison to the export level achieved during the last fiscal. Currently, his concerns are exporting weighbridges to 10 countries with an office in Tanzania.

On the success of his venture he credited this to employees who have been wholeheartedly working with him.