AlCircle had the opportunity to interview Mr Prithish Chowdhary, Chief Marketing Officer of Titagarh Group, and the discussion centered on manufacturing aluminium train coaches.

AlCircle: Can you tell us about Titagarh's journey with its state-of-the-art manufacturing of aluminium coaches, which are used globally?

Prithish Chowdhary: In order to properly answer the question, we need to tell a bit about the background, of where Titagarh actually started. So, when we started as a wagon manufacturer in 1997, our capacity was very minor, something about half a wagon per day at then and since then we managed to establish ourselves as the largest wagon manufacturer in the country. Because of these changes in the wagon industry in about 2007-2008 we acquired a factory in Hind Motor Complex, Uttar Para, where we used to build EMU & MEMU for the Indian Railways. Now at that point, there was a brief idea that we were building EMU and why not we get into Metro trains as well? Then in 2015, we managed to acquire an Italian company called Titagarh Firema and through this acquisition, we were actually able to get the intellectual property (IP) rights and the designs and the technology to build the state-of-art metro coaches in India. Thereby making us the only Indian multinational company in this field, as well as the only Indian company to have our own IPRs, own technology and own designs to build such state-of-art metro coaches and semi-high speed trains. So, effectively the journey started with the act of building our EMUs in 2007, but in 2015 when we acquired the Italian entity is that when we got access to knowhow the technology, the designs and to all the processes that owe to building these trains.