The Power of “Make in India”: Rishi Laser’s 32-Year Journey in Local Manufacturing

“Make in India” became a national slogan in 2014. Some manufacturers were already living it twenty years before that.

Rishi Laser was incorporated in Pune in 1994, two decades before “Make in India” existed as a government program, and at a time when CNC laser cutting was barely established in the Indian market. The company was among the first in the country to bring the technology in. That’s worth sitting with for a second: the policy framework celebrating domestic manufacturing today is catching up to work some companies were already doing.

This isn’t a story about riding a policy wave. It’s a story about what 32 years of compounding manufacturing investment actually looks like, and why that history matters more than a slogan when an OEM is choosing a fabrication partner.

From One Plant to Seven

The growth arc is straightforward to state and harder to execute: a single facility in Pune in 1994, scaling to seven manufacturing units across five states by 2025, with the newest unit in Malur, Karnataka, coming online that same year. Today that footprint spans Pune (two units), Bengaluru (two units), Chennai, Vadodara, and Haryana covering India’s major industrial corridors rather than concentrating in one region.

That geographic spread isn’t incidental. OEMs sourcing components at scale need supply continuity that doesn’t depend on a single plant, a single state’s labor market, or a single regional disruption. Seven plants across five states is a deliberate de-risking choice as much as a growth metric.

Each expansion also meant absorbing a new layer of capability CNC laser cutting, then plasma and oxyfuel cutting for heavier plate work, CNC press brake bending, punching, robotic and cobot welding, and surface treatment. The company didn’t simply replicate one factory seven times; it built out an end-to-end fabrication chain that now spans design and development through finishing, under one roof, at every location.

What Three Decades of Manufacturing Actually Builds

Certifications are the visible proof points: ISO 9001:2015 across all seven units, ISO 14001:2015 environmental management at the Bengaluru facility, EN 15085-2 CL-1 for railway welding and EN 1090 for structural steel fabrication, both at Pune. Each of those took years to earn and requires ongoing audits to keep they’re not a one-time application.

What’s less visible is the workforce behind them. Rishi Laser employs more than 650 people today, including AWS-certified welders and design engineers, many of whom have built careers inside the company’s evolution from a single fabrication shop into a multi-state engineering partner. That kind of institutional knowledge operators who’ve worked through three or four generations of equipment upgrades doesn’t transfer with a purchase order. It’s built, slowly, inside a company that’s been around long enough to build it.

The client roster reflects the same pattern of compounding trust rather than one-off wins: companies like Caterpillar, Volvo, Siemens, Alstom, Schneider Electric, and L&T don’t typically hand structural or safety-relevant work to a new supplier without years of qualification and proven delivery. Long-standing relationships across automotive, earthmoving, railway, and power sectors are themselves evidence of sustained capability, not just current capacity.

Why “Make in India” Needs Manufacturers With a Track Record

The national policy push Make in India, the Production Linked Incentive scheme, Atmanirbhar Bharat is built on the premise that India can manufacture at the quality and scale global OEMs require, not just at a lower price point. That premise only holds if there are domestic manufacturers who’ve already proven they can hit those standards consistently, across multiple sectors, over a long enough period to have ironed out the problems.

A 32-year operating history means Rishi Laser has lived through multiple economic cycles, technology transitions from manual fabrication through CNC to robotics and shifts in what global buyers demand from Indian suppliers. That history is a different kind of asset than a new entrant’s modern equipment list, however impressive that list might be. It’s the difference between a company that has scaled and a company that is hoping to.

The Catch With Longevity Claims

Being old isn’t the same as being good. Plenty of manufacturers have been around for decades and lost relevance because they never modernized the founding year sits on their letterhead while their equipment list stays frozen in 2005. The real test is what a company did with the time: kept investing, or coasted.

Rishi Laser’s recent moves the 2025 Malur unit, the build-out of RL Robotics as its own division, current ISO and EN certifications that require ongoing re-audits to keep read like a company still adding capability rather than resting on a founding date. That’s the distinction worth checking for in any “decades in business” pitch, this one included.

What This Means Going Forward

India’s manufacturing sector is at an inflection point where global OEMs are actively shifting fabrication work to Indian suppliers, driven by cost competitiveness, but increasingly also by proven quality and delivery reliability. Companies with three decades of operating history, multi-state capacity, and certifications that took years to earn are positioned to absorb that demand. Companies without that foundation are starting from a much earlier point on the same curve.

Sources:

• Rishi Laser — About Us
• IBEF — Indian Railways Industry: Network, Growth & Opportunities
• PIB — Production Linked Incentive Schemes for 14 Key Sectors

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