Discounting 2020

In an upfront conversation, Dinesh Tyagi, Director at ICAT spoke of the need to discount 2020 from the five-year vision and 10-year target plan of ICAT.

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Q. How did the pandemic influence operations spanning product development and innovation, testing, and compliance?

A. During the pandemic, ICAT, in April, was fully shut. When the Haryana government allowed us to operate, we opened up at full capacity. While the employees were back in the laboratories, work was still limited. The month of May and June were not good in terms of operations. July onwards, we attained 60 per cent of our pre-Covid-19 operational levels at about two-thirds of the expected levels.

Q. To give us a sense of scale, how does ICAT compare to similar authorities in the European market?

A. If you look at the volume of work and the kind of business volume that we have been handling, it is quite large when compared to that of authorities in the European market. However, our testing fees and other charges are lower due to which our revenues are also at a comparatively lower scale.

Q. In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment, how did you allocate resources across the various ICAT services offered?

A. We had to freeze all our recruitments. Some people also left the organization during this pandemic which was very surprising as they were being paid a full salary. We have refrained from hiring any new resources. The idea is to operate very efficiently and in a very lean frame, sweating all our resources.

Q. Post the BSVI rollout, what requirement are you dealing with for compliance across fuel types and vehicle segments? What has been the scale of testing and certification?

A. We have certified many BSVI products at the vehicle level and the engine level. So we have tested more than hundreds of vehicles, engines and models to give a rough idea.