The India Engineering Story ; Long Considered a Job Shop, India Is Turning Out to Be an Engineering Centre As Well. But There's a Long Way to Go.

Summary

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When the German carmaker Audi recently invited a few Indian companies to showcase their engineering prowess, Hemant Luthra dumped his laptop and took his Scorpio instead. "I told the Audi Chairman that we had developed this car ourselves. Not just that, we had done the left-hand drive conversion ourselves, and that the car cost just 15,000 euros," recalls the CEO of Mahindra Systems and Automotive Technologies (MSAT). Needless to say, the Audi Chairman was impressed, and so much so that he took the utility vehicle out for a spin and upon return instructed his engineers to pore over it. "No one is for a minute suggesting that we can develop a better vehicle than the Germans or the Japanese just yet, but we are getting there," says Luthra.

Point taken. Long considered just a job shop (blame it on little R&D by local vehicle manufacturers), India is getting serious attention for its engineering skills. The turning point really was Tata Motors launching a made-in-India car, the Indica, for Rs 280 crore in 1998 (an additional Rs 1,400 crore was spent on the plant). Five years later, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) stunned the world too with its locally-built Scorpio, which cost a bare Rs 250 crore to develop-globally, developing such a vehicle can cost $2-3 billion (Rs 9,000-13,500 crore). That was followed by foreign carmarkers such as Ford and Suzuki Motor tapping the engineering talent in their subsidiaries to build cars for the Indian market. Most recently, Suzuki's Swift-one of the five cars it plans to launch over the next five years-was built with help from MUL engineers. Actually, MUL shipped out 25 engineers who camped for three years at Suzuki's headquarters in Hamamatsu in Japan, working on things like suspension, seats and the tailgate. Even Ford Motor is said to have tapped local talent for its newly-launched sedan, Fiesta. Says Pawan Goenka, President of M&M's automotive business and the young engineer M&M poached from General Motors (gm) to lead Scorpio's development, "If you go to Michigan or Europe, you'd be surprised at the number of Indian engineers doing high-level tasks, and the good news for us is that they want to return to India now," says Goenka.

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The India Engineering Story ; Long Considered a Job Shop, India Is Turning Out to Be an Engineering Centre As Well. But There's a Long Way to Go.

What's true of the carmakers is true of the two-wheeler manufacturers too. Bajaj Auto and TVS Motor have significantly improved their design and engineering skills. While TVS has built its new motorbikes virtually alone after it split with S...

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