Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In the mid 1990s, General Motors (GM) started buying components from India and se-
lected Maini, which became the American company's smallest supplier. The components
that GM needed were difficult to make because machining operations left complicated
burrs (rough edges) on the metal surface. The order was for 8,000 pieces a day, which re-
quired 45 women just to remove the burrs. Jugaad came into play when the Mainis thought
of a simple low-cost solution - a small device that enabled the burrs to be seen through a
45-degree mirror, making removal easy and reducing the number of workers involved to
two.
'If General Motors tells us it needs a special component in 30 days, we do a jugaad
solution for that sort of fast development and production, maybe making it manually,' says
Sandeep, Maini's eldest son, who now heads the group. The second stage is to put in a
process to make the component reliably, and that means producing it by appropriate tech-
nology that is not jugaad - the process equals reliability.
Maini's enthusiasm for perfection led the group to expand sales from Rs 1 crore in 1982
to Rs 350 crore in 2012, with 70 per cent of the production being exported and a product
range that was diversified from automobile components to higher levels of precision engin-
eering for the defence and aviation industries. Companies like Bosch, BAE, Boeing, Volvo
and GE have become customers and the group is also into specialist vehicles and plastics,
and is looking at automated logistics systems and warehousing.
Maini's youngest son, Chetan, expanded the family's engineering traditions by spending
15 years pioneering electric cars, which culminated in March 2013 in the launch of the
with model vehicles when he was a child. While studying at the University of Michigan in
the US, he worked, in 1990, on General Motors' award-winning Sunracer solar-powered
racing car, and in 1994, he co-founded the Reva Electric Car Company (RECC).
The Reva was first developed with an American company and the Mainis saved costs
by sending some components from India, including a dashboard instrument panel from
an established manufacturer in Coimbatore, the jugaad capital of southern India. 'We de-
signed and developed the testing equipment for a variety of components, including bat-
teries, which on an average cost us less than 1 per cent of what we would normally pay
if we bought the same in the market - a typical jugaad example,' says Sudarshan Maini.
Assembly of the electric cars started in 2001, with five people producing the first seven
vehicles in Bengaluru. To avoid having to build an assembly track for the small quantities,
the car's tubular metal frame was put on wheels and pushed down the production line.
Eventually, to become a global brand, Reva needed more funds than the family was pre-
pared to risk, and in 2010, the Mahindra auto-based group bought a 56 per cent stake in a
new company, Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles. Mahindra put in a total investment of Rs
