Ram Charan to invest Rs 15K crore to set up plants in TN, Gujarat

Ram Charan — the little-known Chennai-based chemicals trader which, of late, has been developing technologies and equipment to convert industrial and municipal waste into energy that leave no residues — is investing Rs 15,000 crore to set up two such manufacturing plants in Tamil Nadu and Guajrat, a top company official has said.

While the Tamil Nadu unit will come up in the Rameshwaram district on a 70-acre land which will be acquired by the end of the month, the Gujarat plant will come on a similar sized plot in the Kutch district and the land for the same should be acquired by the end of the month or early next month.

Both the plants will see an investment of Rs 7,500 crore each and will be up and running in the third quarter of 2022, Kaushik Palicha, a director of the company, and the third generation of the founding family, told PTI from Chennai.

Palicha’s father had hailed from the Kutch region of Gujarat and had moved into Kerala’s Alleppey in the early part of the last century and then moved onto Madras (now Chennai) in the 1950s where they began chemicals trading in 1965.

Before entering deep-tech research in 2016 they had set up a joint venture with Japanese firm Shinji Kato in Baroda to manufacture speciality plastic components.

Ram Charan's R&D is focused on developing end-of-life chemicals converting unsegregated waste into energy and manufacturing new-generation energy storage devices — the primary reason for the American fund TFCC International to go for such a high valuation and equity partnership for $4.14 billion.

Its waste-to-energy products and services are delivered under the brand name 'Entity One' and does not leave any residual waste, he added.