How Bharat Forge Is Being Rebooted

Baba Kalyani wants to turn his company into a digital powerhouse with AI, automation, and a dark plant sans people

- T Surendar & Satish John

T Surendar & Satish John MUMBAI Step inside Bharat Forge's sprawling Pune headquarters, and it doesn't feel like the factory floor of an old-line forging company. The clang of presses shaping red-hot steel still echoes, but increasingly it is drowned out by the buzz of servers, the glow of digital dashboards, and young engineers clustered around AI terminals.

On a wall-sized screen, live data streams in from plants in Germany and the United States. Every press, every induction furnace, every machine has a digital twin.

"We can see in real time what's happening in any of our plants worldwide," says Baba Kalyani, chairman and managing director (CMD), gesturing at the display. "If a press in our US plant has a problem, engineers here in Pune can correct it remotely. It's like online surgery for machines."

Then he adds the line that defines Bharat Forge's future: "In the next three years, we will have a dark factory—a plant that runs without people. That's where manufacturing is going, and that's where Bharat Forge must go."

This is Bharat Forge 2.0 in action—a radical reinvention of a six-decade-old forging company into a digitally-driven, automation-first technology powerhouse straddling defence, aerospace, mobility, and now even AI infrastructure.

Not Plan BThe timing of this reinvention is no accident. Bharat Forge can no longer afford to just be the world's largest forging company. Its legacy auto-components business of making combustion engines, gear boxes and other transmission parts faces disruption from the rise of electric vehicles, while India's defence modernization drive demands far more than metal-bashing prowess—it requires mastery over electronics, software, AI, and complex systems integration.