Soon, when you drive to a mall, all you might have to do is punch a card to park your car. Bid adieu to long queues and wasted fuel
Soon, when you drive to a mall, all you might have to do is punch a card to park your car. Bid adieu to long queues and wasted fuel
If you live in a city and drive a car, chances are your parking travails will resonate with millions of others in India. The experience may range from delayed meetings to deflated tyres (the act of angry residents); fines in no-parking zones, stolen valuables to even vehicles getting towed away from that no-man’s land — the space that borders on the parking and no-parking zone.
With 800,000 cars and 15 million two-wheelers being added to Indian roads every year, finding a place to park is an everyday battle.
But residents of Delhi, especially those who work or live in Connaught Place, could be in for some respite. From sometime in July, a fully automated public car parking system on Baba Kharak Singh Marg will allow 1,400 cars to be parked on eight floors of a 10-storey building (two floors will have a shopping complex).
Car owners will punch a card and leave their vehicle at an entry point pallet (a steel plate). A lift will move the pallet to an available parking slot. On return, owners will punch their card again and the vehicle will be retrieved in three minutes, says Ranjit Date, founder-president and joint MD of Precision Automation and Robotics India (PARI), a Pune firm that designed and developed the parking system.
The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) land on which this is built has been developed by DLF. The cost for car owners? A mere Rs. 10 per hour — for now. This is the price DLF is charging to encourage car owners to use this facility. Builders and PARI say Rs. 50 an hour is a more realistic price.
PARI installed a similar system, for 50 cars, at Chennai’s Saravana mall. It has been working for six months now.
So far, NDMC has tendered 43 public parking plots, but this is the first to open for use. It will soon be followed by a similar facility for 800 cars in Sarojini Nagar, also developed by DLF. Date is getting dozens of such proposals, and the Delhi project will be a test, not only for PARI but also for DLF and NDMC to see if this is the right approach to solving the parking problem.
PARI, a little-known company, has served the automotive sector with its industrial automation solutions for over a decade. In 2007, its two founders, Date and Mangesh Kale, decided that being sector-specific wasn’t a good idea. The early impact of the downturn on the automotive sector proved them right. In 2008, they decided to build automated parking systems also.
PARI’s flagship product, a fully automated parking system, costs half of what is available globally. The system multiplies a land’s car parking capacity by 16: If a plot can take 50 cars, the automated system can take 800. But, at Rs. 5 lakh a spot (PARI’s cost to build one parking spot), one could argue it’s for developers with deep pockets.
Date doesn’t agree. It’s an infrastructure issue; it’s no longer in the realm of economics, but public policy. Centres like Nariman Point and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly, Victoria Terminus) in Mumbai have pockets of land that can be converted into such parking spaces. “It can solve the problem [of parking] overnight,” he says. Builders seem to agree: “This is the future,” says Pradeep Khanna, director at Bharti Realty, who is considering this solution for old and new properties.
Small Beginnings
Outside PARI’s five acre campus in Narhe, Pune, that houses 460 of its 960 employees, scores of cars are neatly parked. Doesn’t it need an automated parking system for its own use, you wonder?
Inside, several robotic systems are under development. A hydrostatic probe for in-service inspection of steam generators for Nuclear Power Corporation of India is in the final stages of shipment. Next to it is a surgical arm prototype, something like the $2 million Da Vinci robotic instrument from the US firm Intuitive Surgicals. A few feet away stands a hulking nuclear waste disposal system, a smaller version of which is at Mumbai’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. But, for now, car stackers and the automated parking system is occupying minds and space.
From 1990 when PARI was incorporated, to 1993 when it sold its first industrial robot to Philips, to until 2007, it served the automotive and consumer appliances industry. The likes of General Motors and Honda formed the clientele. In 2007, Date and Kale decided to diversify and decided on automation in car parking and logistics.
By then the company’s R&D and manufacturing foundation was already set. In a way, it was the culmination of a long journey for these Pune College of Engineering graduates. These school friends were college buddies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), New York. The long association is evident when they talk — one takes off from where the other stops. The complementarity — Date is an optimist with a we-can-achieve-anything viewpoint; Kale goes after detail and execution — is deep rooted. That’s perhaps the secret behind them visualising a business in the 1980s, when they were students and when the manufacturing world was moving on without much of robotics, and India was focussed on cost.
“We thought if we can make automation cost-effective and pitch it as a disruptive or high-performance tool, it would make for a good business model,” says Date. Their time at RPI helped cement the idea. While they were students there, RPI pipped other US engineering schools to win a $10 million robotics project from NASA. “We learnt a lot from that,” remembers Kale.
Applying the learning to their start-up wasn’t easy. There was no precedence in India for robotics. “We had to do everything from scratch — design, manufacturing, testing, manpower training. We began with just four engineers,” they recall, proudly adding that now they hire 620 graduate engineers. With Rs. 40 crore in private equity investment from Axis Holdings and a Mumbai-based high net worth individual, PARI’s 2010 revenue was Rs. 260 crore. It is developing a 73-acre manufacturing unit in Shirwal, near Pune, earmarked as one of the 110 mega projects by the state government.
Cracking the Parking Code
(This story appears in the 15 July, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)