BHEL employees’ zeal to excel supported by the company’s constant encouragement has also resulted in its employees winning a sizeable number of 40 prestigious Prime Minister’s Shram Awards so far. These awards are the country’s highest honour bestowed on individuals for outstanding achievements leading to higher productivity, improved quality, greater safety and foreign exchange savings.

Significantly, this year, among Public and Private sector companies, the highest number of eight Shram Awards won by 14 BHEL employees. This includes the solitary Shram Bhushan awarded this year, also the highest award in the series declared this year.

Ingrained in all the employees of the company, the culture of excellence has culminated in a BHEL employee, Mr. B.L. Chouksey, being conferred one of the country’s highest civilian honours - ‘Padmashri’ for the year 2005, by the President of India, for his valuable contribution in the field of science and engineering.

A pioneer in Human Resource Development in India, BHEL realises the value of quality human resources and that the development of this critical resource has become imperative, in view of a business environment where globalisation, competition, customer expectations, fast pace of change and new economic policies pose serious challenges.

Aimed at encouraging individuals to take up improvement projects for capability building and for continuous improvement in every sphere of activity, an Improvement Projects Rewards Scheme (IMPRESS), has been introduced company-wide. The scheme is e-network based and has a very well defined, structured modus operandi. The scheme provides weightage
for various aspects like relevance to the department, innovation/creativity, meeting targets, institutionalisation, deployability and financial impact.

On their appointment as directors on the Board of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), both A.K. Mathur and K. Ravi Kumar have assumed their respective charges as Director (Industrial Systems & Products) and Director (Power) of India’s Navratna public sector engineering and manufacturing enterprise.

Earlier,A.K. Mathur was the Executive Director of Company’s manufacturing plant at Trichy while as Executive Director, K. Ravi Kumar was heading BHEL’s power sector (marketing) division.

Ravi Kumar joined BHEL in 1975 after a brief stint in the private sector. He made significant contributions in various key functions like Engineering of Control Equipment Products in Electronics Division Bangalore, Construction and Project Management of Thermal, Hydro, Nuclear and Industrial sets in Power Sector Southern Region and Head of Marketing of Power Sector.

During his stay, new technologies in the field of coal and gas-based power plants were introduced for the first time into the country and were meticulously executed. Some of these were ‘Tower Type Boilers’ at Vijayawada, ‘Advance Class Gas Turbines’ at Kovilkalappal in Tamil Nadu, ‘Once Through Boilers’ at Talcher, etc. During Mr. K. Ravi Kumar’s tenure as head of power-sector marketing, an all-time high order booking of about Rs.13,500 crore was achieved in the Power Sector business segment, during the fiscal 2004-05.