COIMBATORE: Leading industrialist ‘Textool’ D Balasundaram passed away at his residence at Avarampalayam here on Wednesday. He was 96.
India’s first indigenous motor manufacturer, Balasundaram started Textool in 1946. He was earlier working with the National Engineering Works of G D Naidu. He was the first to bring in ring frame technology as well.
An electrical engineer from Sheffield University, England, Balasundaram had training in a major industrial unit there that had 12,000 employees manufacturing components for power stations.
He is said to have used the “copper rotor welding” technology to design the motor.
Born in 1913 at Avarampalayam, Coimbatore, he first established the Coimbatore Engineering and Trading Company to manufacture textile machine components.
In 1948, the Union Government requested his Textool Company to manufacture guns. Balasundaram set up a separate division for the same, providing a range of arms from sten guns to SBBL-12. His company, which started producing more and more textile components in 1949, had as much as 2,000 employees by 1952, an achievement by itself.
Textool became so prominent that it was manufacturing almost all the components required for textile units and emerged as one of the top three in the country manufacturing such items.