Honeywell to expand engineering staff in India, expand Madurai staff by 50%

Honeywell Technology Solutions (HTS), the engineering arm of American technology firm Honeywell, is planning to expand its workforce in the country. In an interview with Mint, Samuel Pratap, president of HTS, said the company is looking to hire more engineers in the country.

The company has four technology centres in India, in Bengaluru, Madurai, Hyderabad and Gurugram, with Bengaluru being the biggest of the four. It completed 20 years of the Madurai center earlier this month.

India, Czech Republic and Mexico are the three big technology centers for Honeywell globally, which employ about a third of the company’s engineering workforce globally, with India being the biggest, Pratap said. These centers work on four big businesses for Honeywell — aerospace, performance materials and technologies, building solutions, and safety and productivity.

While Pratap didn’t disclose how many engineers the company is going to hire, he said that the company will be increasing its staff at its center in Madurai by 50%. He also said that the first focus will be to hire new engineers for both building solutions and performance materials, in both Bengaluru and Madurai.

The company already has over 5000 engineers in the country, and over 10,000 employees in total in India. Pratap said that most of Honeywell’s hires will be in software, hardware, chemical and other forms of engineering.

Further, Pratap said that post 2020, the company has increased its focus on the Indian market as well, driven by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for an aatmanirbhar Bharat. “We do have products that are either completely developed for the local market, or global products for local needs,” he said.

He added that the company is looking to interact with the Ministry of Civil Aviation to help create the government’s Digital Sky platform, which will help monitor and manage movement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in cities in India. UAVs will be one of the focus areas for its Madurai center.

“We believe that UAM (Unmanned Air Mobility), UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) will be a core technology, and autonomous controls is a technology we have rich experience on,” he said. “But what still needs to evolve is the governance of how the future of flight will take place. Air traffic is so very controlled by the air traffic management systems, which will tell you how to fly, what height to fly etc. We want to play in those spaces of governance. We’re creating a huge infrastructure where such algorithms are being developed,” he added, saying India is ahead in these policies.

The company is also proposing an engine for the HTT-40 trainer aircraft of the Indian Air Force, which was introduced last year. It also partnered with Narayana Health last month to develop healthcare technologies for the latter’s hospitals. Honeywell and Narayana are developing tech solutions that help in patient monitoring using sensors and mobile phones instead of collecting that data manually.