With Adage Automation, Dr Abhijit Chatterjee is proving that tech and manufacturing leadership can be built from India
There is a particular kind of stubbornness that founds companies, and Dr Abhijit Chatterjee has it. In 2001, having spent years in the field of gas analytics at large companies such as Tata Steel, Yokogawa and ABB, he and few of his other colleagues kept circling the same irritating question: why do Indian analytical companies not dominate the gas analytics marketplace despite the talent and the demand for it? It is one of the most specialised niche technologies in the industrial world, the business of measuring and analysing the gases that pour through a refinery, a steel furnace or a cement kiln and the high-end systems invariably arrived from Europe, Japan or America. “A few of us were analytical and instrumentation engineers who had worked across the big global automation companies,” he recalls. “We simply couldn’t see why a world-class system couldn’t be built here, in India, and sent out across India and the world.”
A quarter of a century later, that question has answered itself rather emphatically. From 2 factories in Verna, Goa, Adage Automation now runs what is to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the world’s largest dedicated gas analytical systems integration facility, roughly 10,000 square metres across two units, with an installed base spread across 40+ countries. A company that began by trying to substitute imports is today having the largest market share in India for Gas Analytics surpassing by two times of that of Number 2 in this field. In the words of one of the most respected industry professionals from one of the largest companies from the US, “Adage’s solutions, designed and built out of India is now approved and acceptable for our global projects”.
Adage Automation specializes in two types of gas analytical solutions. The first is process solutions: the process gas analyzers, gas chromatographs, NIR, Mass Spectrometers, TDLAS, Sulphur and physical-property analysers that let a plant run efficiently and safely. The second is environmental, the continuous emission monitoring systems and air-quality solutions that help monitor emissions and keep industry compliant with regulations. Adage integrates the whole chain, right down to the explosion-proof analyzer shelters with their specialised and certified HVAC and advanced AI based monitoring capabilities. Prasad, the Chief Technology Officer of Adage says ”We engineer a complete solution and we handle it end to end. That is what makes niche technology defensible.”
The customer list reads like a roll-call of global heavy industry: ADNOC, SABIC, ExxonMobil, Linde, Toyo, ThyssenKrupp, Lafarge, Cemex, T.EN and Air Liquide, with some of them Adage is a preferred partner. At home it is much the same, with its analyzers and emission monitoring systems running across the plants of India’s biggest names, from Reliance Industries, Tata, JSW, Adani Industries and Aditya Birla plants to public-sector majors like IOCL, BPCL, HPCL, ONGC, GAIL, SAIL and NTPC. The projects carry similar heft. Adage have built gas analytical systems for Saudi Arabia’s NEOM green hydrogen plant, and has executed the World’s largest CEMS project ever attempted by stack count, with over 150 stacks and more than 300 analyzers. “Not so long ago,” Dr Abhijit says, “an Indian company would not even have been invited to bid for these.”
The headquarters and the engineering heart stay firmly in Goa, but Adage has stitched together a genuine international body around it. Adage has expanded globally into a factory in Abu Dhabi, built to serve ADNOC from inside the Emirates; another big facility in Jubail in Saudi Arabia serving ARAMCO and a widening roster of the Kingdom’s energy and petrochemical majors; operations in New Jersey USA; and a presence in Germany, at Düsseldorf. The Gulf units are joint ventures, a deliberate choice with The Kanoo Group, one of the Gulf’s oldest and most respected family conglomerates, in business since 1890. “Our Middle East customers value local manufacturing and local support,” Dr Abhijit explains. “The joint ventures let us be genuinely local while bringing Adage’s engineering and unique experience.” Think global, act local is something we actually live.”
Adage partners with Siemens of Germany, Valmet in the United States, Ametek PI, Process Insights, AirOptic Poland and others, folding the best available technologies into systems it engineers itself. With Valmet it has built a particularly tight model for Global Projects, pooling their local reach and knowhow of North America with Adage’s execution muscle to chase bigger projects together. In a niche this deep, Dr. Abhijit notes, the partnerships are how a Goan company earns a seat at the global table.
The company is investing heavily in Digitalisation, Machine Learning and AI, in areas like predictive emission monitoring and intelligent ASM, with the intent to lead that shift within its niche. A third Indian factory, 170,000 square feet in all, had its foundation stone laid in February 2025 and should be running by March 2027, big enough to build forty analyzer houses at once. Europe is next on the map, with a base planned in France.
Ask him for a parting thought to the young entrepreneurs of Goa and the answer comes without hesitation. “Be impatient about the dream and patient about the build,” he says. ”We started with a niche idea, a small team, and a big belief, that excellence has no geography. The world does not care any more where a product is built or whether it has been done before. It cares only whether it meets the highest standard. And can it be better? To me, that is the true spirit of Make in India: the confidence that an Indian company can lead the world, even in the most specialised technologies. If we could do it from Goa, others can too.”
