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Vadodara: Larsen & Toubro (L&T), which is setting up Knowledge City, wants to develop Vadodara as country’s largest engineering hub. While inaugurating an engineering campus at Waghodia on the outskirts of the city on Friday, L&T’s chairman and managing director AM Naik said that Vadodara will act as headquarters of three out of 18 operating companies of the group, including L&T Power, L&T Hydrocarbon and E-engineering.

“City will have 12,000 to 15,000 engineers by 2020 at a single location,” said Naik, adding that Knowledge City will act as headquarters of the three companies. L&T also wants to set up an engineering college for its employees for which it has already approached state government.
Naik said that former ABB India head Ravi Uppal has already been appointed as CEO and managing director of L&T Power, a 100 percent subsidiary of L&T. “In engineering services, we will create 10,000 new jobs over next four years, of which half will be in Gujarat,” he said, adding, “In hydrocarbon space, it will cater to needs of the upstream, midstream and downstream sectors and in power, design support for complete projects. We expect to generate project exports revenue of over Rs 2,000 crore within five years and generate employment to around 5,000 technical professionals in next five years,” he said. Integrated campus will enable L&T to extend and further develop its existing capabilities in process engineering, product development, mechanical design and analysis, process evaluation and technology adaptation.Apart from that, L&T is also setting up Institute of Project Management to develop project managers across domains of engineering, procurement, construction and manufacturing at ‘Knowledge City’. The campus that presently houses three buildings will see investment worth Rs 500 crore in infrastructure and buildings alone spread over a period of five years. L&T plans to have 11 buildings constructed across 112 acres in first phase which will also house convention centre, employees hostel, residential colony, food courts and entertainment facilities. “We have utilised only part of the capacity and it has potential for expansion ten times over,” said Naik, adding that in next five years, over 2,000 employees will live on the campus.