On his appointment as Chairman & Managing Director of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (Bhel), Atul Sobti, 56, has assumed charge as CMD of India’s largest Maharatna Public Sector engineering and manufacturing enterprise with effect from January 1, Friday.
Prior to this, Sobti was director on the Board of Bhel, heading two crucial portfolios of power and finance. Earlier, he has also held additional charge of the post of Director (Engineering, R&D). In addition, he is the Chairman of Raichur Power Corporation Limited, a joint venture company of Bhel and Karnataka Power Corporation Limited. Before his elevation to the Board in December, 2013, he was Executive Director (Power) at Bhel, New Delhi, and was also holding concurrent charge of Industrial Systems Group, a Bengaluru based unit of Bhel.
Significantly, as Director (Power), Sobti was responsible for spearheading and strategising for the power sector business of Bhel and under his stewardship, Bhel’s power business has achieved major milestones including the highest ever capacity addition/synchronisation of 13,452 mw and 11,941 mw in financial years 2013-14 and 2014-15, respectively. In fact, in fiscal 2014-15, Bhel exceeded Ministry of Power’s capacity addition target by 19%. Under his leadership, the trend has continued in the current fiscal (2015-16) and Bhel has already commissioned/synchronised projects of around 8,000 mw, the highest ever in the first nine months of a financial year.
He has been instrumental in strategising and securing a series of orders from various state utilities including Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand and Punjab besides Central utilities like NTPC and NLC. Sobti is a mechanical graduate engineer with post graduation in international management and diploma in project management.
He has also undergone advanced management programmes at IIM, Ahmedabad and Asian Institute of Management, Manila. Sobti has a rich repertoire of diverse and versatile professional experience of 35 years, working in various capacities in all major segments of Bhel including international operations, a major manufacturing plant of Bhel at Hyderabad, corporate planning and development, new capital projects and project engineering and systems integration divisions at Bhel Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
During his tenure at Bhel’s international operations division, Sobti was a key contributor to a fifteen fold increase in its overseas business through securing and executing prestigious power projects and product orders from many countries including Oman, UAE, Iraq, Libya, China, Kazakhstan, Suriname, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc.
During his tenures at Bhel’s units at Bengaluru and Hyderabad, the units achieved record financial and physical performance. He was also instrumental in steering the future growth plans and new business initiatives in these divisions. As a member of new capital projects group, in the eighties, Atul Sobti was actively associated in setting up of new Bhel plants at Rudrapur, Varanasi, PCRI-Haridwar, Jagdishpur, Goindwal.