37 Years, 1,977 Machines: What One Institute's Own Numbers Say About FMTTI Waiting Times

"How long will this take?" is the first question almost every manufacturer asks us. We wanted to answer it with something better than a rule of thumb, so we went looking for real numbers.

We found them. SRFMTTI — the Southern Region institute at Garladinne, Anantapur — publishes a target-and-achievement statement covering every year since it began testing in 1989-90. Two pages of plain table, and to our mind one of the most genuinely useful documents any institute puts out.

Here's what we took from it.

A facility built from a standing start

Across its first ten years, 1989-90 to 1998-99, the institute released 50 test reports in total — two in the opening year, then a handful annually as the facility, the equipment and the engineering team came together.

Set that against 250 machines in 2024-25 and you have the real story in this document: a fifty-fold increase in annual output, built steadily over three and a half decades.

We keep that trajectory in mind whenever the conversation turns to testing capacity. It has been expanding for as long as the institute has existed, and it is still expanding now.

The output curve

Period	Target (per year)	Actual output	What changed
1989-90 to 1998-99	5–10	50 total	Institute establishing itself
1999-20 to 2003-04	10	8, 5, 21, 34, 20	First time output overshot target
2004-05 to 2009-10	25	17, then 25 every year	Target met exactly, six years running
2010-11 to 2014-15	35	36, 35, 41, 51, 52	Steady growth past target
2015-16	35	159	A step change — 4.5× the target
2016-17 to 2023-24	90	96 to 152	Target raised to 90 and met every year
2024-25	125	250	Highest year on record
2025-26 (to Jan)	125	127	Target already passed with two months to run

Three things stood out to us.

2015-16 was a step change. Output went from 52 machines to 159 in a single year, against a target of 35. The statement records the figures without explaining what drove them, and we're not going to speculate. What matters is what followed: the target was raised from 35 to 90, and the institute has met or beaten it every year since.

Six consecutive years of hitting the target exactly. From 2005-06 to 2009-10, output matched the target of 25 machines every single year — the kind of consistency that suggests a well-run planning cycle.

2024-25 is the record. 250 machines against a target of 125, the highest annual figure in the institute's history by nearly 100 machines. And 2025-26 was already past its full-year target of 125 by January, with two months still to run.

What this actually tells you about your wait

It gives you the denominator — the scale you're planning against, rather than your exact place in the queue.

An institute releasing between 96 and 250 reports a year is working through a real and substantial volume of machines. Where your application sits in that flow depends on your category, your timing and how complete your filing is.

The figures also told us something we hadn't expected: the year-to-year range is wider than the differences people tend to assume between institutes. SRFMTTI's own output more than doubled between 2021-22 and 2024-25. That's why, when we're asked for a timeline, we'd rather talk through the current year at your target institute than hand over a generic number of months.

Why the slot matters more than the queue

A second document changed how we read all of this. A 2013 Ministry order — F.No. 13-37/2000-M&T(I&P), dated 8 March 2013, addressed to the directors of all four institutes — was issued specifically to bring waiting times down. It set out three measures:

• Institutes may hire contractual manpower to increase testing capacity.
• The full test fee is payable at the time of the initial application, with all required documents. Any application that does not meet this is liable to be summarily rejected.
• Manufacturers already on a waiting list were given one month to deposit the full fee. Those who did not would lose their seniority, and the waiting list would be recast.

Read alongside the output figures, that order makes a lot of sense. Capacity takes years to build, so the quicker win was to make sure every slot is held by an application that's ready to proceed. It worked in the manufacturer's favour too: a queue made up of complete applications moves faster for everyone in it.

It's also why we tell clients that the part of the timeline most within their control is the filing itself.

The part you control

Throughput is the institute's to manage, and the figures show they've managed it well. Filing is yours, and getting it right first time is what secures your slot.

In practice that means the application, the fee receipt, the category-specific specification sheet and the full documentation set arriving together and complete. It's unglamorous work, and in our experience it's where the timeline is won — it's most of what we do under documentation and filing, and choosing the right institute and timing is what we handle under institute and slot coordination.

We'll be plain about what we do and don't do. The testing is always carried out by the institute's own engineers, and the queue moves at the pace the institute sets. Our job is to make sure your application is ready to move with it.