NEW DELHI: Guenter Butschek , the expatriate managing director at Tata Motors , wants a level playing field for home-grown companies, saying it was not a plea for protection but to secure make in India and encourage local investment.“Some of our (foreign) competitors have a much easier game. They have the solution already. So for them it was more a question of customisation,” Butschek said. “So, the whole engineering part and testing, etc., is less for somebody else who has a BS-VI solution ready, it’s not required (for them). It’s a shortcut (for them but) which has extremely compressed my timelines for all these activities.”Some foreign companies have very small engineering facilities in India, just good enough to provide localisation in industrial activities. But that takes care of political issues and transfer of technology, while working against the interests of home-grown companies that have to build everything from scratch on their own, he said.“Although we also have a small engineering unit in the UK, this is all for advanced technologies,” Butschek said. “It is not anywhere close to my engineering capabilities that sit in Pune and Jamshedpur. That means for us we really need to have resources for qualifications found only in India and we are partly missing a competitive footprint in India and engineering capabilities of the suppliers.”Butschek said though the company had “happily accepted” the challenge of jumping to Bharat Stage-VI emission standards starting 2020 from BS-IV now, it was a difficult decision as the development of the BS-VI technology was the single largest investment that the company had made in a particular technology.Several foreign automakers already have technologies conforming with Euro-VI standards, which are similar to India’s BS-VI.On the country’s aim to transition to electric mobility, Butschek said the government should encourage the private sector for faster development of infrastructure.