Mumbai: Bajaj Auto Limited inaugurated its greenfield two-wheeler Pantnagar plant at Uttarakhand with a planned capacity of one million motorcycles per annum.

Built on a 65-acre area with another 155 acres allocated for a vendor cluster, the Pantnagar facility is Bajaj Auto's fourth plant and the first outside Maharashtra. The unit has a plant area of 40,000 sq mtr and will employ 600 line engineers who have been trained at Chakan for three months.

In a pioneering manufacturer-vendor partnership, the Bajaj Pantnagar plant will be supported by manufacturing facilities of 16 auto component vendors in the immediate proximity. A part of the land area allocated to Bajaj has been taken up by vendors to set up dedicated facilities to ensure seamless integration with the mother plant resulting in phenomenal manufacturing efficiency.

These cluster suppliers will meet 75 per cent of the component requirement of the new plant. These vendors will operate as the extended factory of the core Bajaj plant. Systems and processes would make this unit the ultimate lean unit in terms of manufacturing efficiency. All supplies from shops and suppliers will be on e-Kanban.

The Pantnagar plant is a compact focused manufacturing facility, which despite being the lowest cost production unit would adhere to the highest global quality standards. This new manufacturing concept is expected to yield 10 times the productivity of other comparable two-wheeler units.

This partnership will see manufacturing and supply of key components including speedometers from Pricol, front fork and suspension from Endurance, lighting systems from Lumax, plastic and electrical components from Varroc, control switches and ignition systems from Minda group and frames from JBM, in the vicinity of the new Bajaj Plant.

Another landmark has been broken in terms of the investment required to create a plant with a capacity of 1 million vehicles annually. Bajaj Auto has directly invested only Rs 150 crore in this facility, making its per vehicle investment a mere Rs 1,500, and thus enable one of the shortest payback periods for any plant globally, and an unparalleled benchmark.

The current plant capacity of 1 million units can be progressively expanded to 3 million vehicles.

The company says that this plant would be completely independent of the other three manufacturing facilities.

While inaugurating the plant, chairman Rahul Bajaj said, "We wish to compliment the Uttarakhand State on its excellent investment environment. This is our first manufacturing foray outside Maharashtra, with the best of manufacturing technology and processes. I am proud to inaugurate this new plant, which sets new benchmarks in automobile manufacturing."

The Bajaj Platina will be the first product to roll out of the Pantnagar plant. And the company says that its customers will also enjoy the excise and income tax benefits available at the new Pantnagar Plant, and accordingly it would re-price the Bajaj Platina at Rs 33,000 ex-showroom as against Rs 36,000 earlier.

S Sridhar, VP, marketing and sales, Bajaj Auto, said, "Over 50 per cent of our domestic two-wheeler sales comes from the Northern and Eastern regions. Our Pantnagar plant will also enable us to meet the needs of our customers in this region faster," he added.