In early 2003, five engineers from Tata
Motors trooped
into the main conference room at Bombay House, the
Victorian sandstone building that houses the
headquarters of the Tata Group. They had been
summoned at a day’s notice from the Tata
Motors
factory in Pune by company Chairman Ratan N. Tata,
who
had just made a promise the world said would be
‘impossible’ to keep.
Tata had told a Financial Times correspondent on the
sidelines of the Geneva Auto Show that he was thinking
of
making a car that would cost about € 2,000. Adjusted
against the then exchange rate of the rupee, that
translated to Rs 1 lakh.
Tata says he had never really
defined the project in his head exclusively by its pricing.
“It was the media that said it,” says Tata.
“But we
decided to accept the challenge….” With that resolution,
Tata imprisoned himself and his engineers in a promise
to
fulfil which they would have to all but rewrite the
principles of automotive engineering.
When the engineers walked into the conference room that morning,
they knew that the meeting had something to do with Tata’s
statement about a small car that they vaguely remembered reading about in
newspapers a few days ago. Little did they realise
then that the next four years of their lives would be dotted with moments of agonising failure and heady success, between which they
would eat, drink
and
catch up with their families. The worst: the engineers would not be able to
share with
anyone, even their wives, what was going on inside their second
home, the drab block of
concrete called Engineering Research Centre (ERC) at Tata Motors’ campus on the outskirts
of
Pune
Jai Bolar, senior manager for
development at Tata Motors’ ERC, recalls that the
team
entered the conference room armed with just a 60-slide presentation
on all the low-cost
modes of personal transport. The vehicles included motorbikes, autorickshaws, scooters
and the company’s own Indica. “We
had no clue as to what we were supposed to do,’’
say Bolar. “So finally, we asked him
whether he could tell us what he had in mind.”
The next few minutes will, forever, be imprinted on the
team’s mind. Tata, or RNT as he is
affectionately called, held forth, exhorting the team to
dream of building a low-cost car that
would cost only marginally more than a two-wheeler
and revolutionize personal transport in
India. Show the world what Indian engineering
is truly capable of, RNT told the engineers.
“Make me also part of the team. Only in a
country like India or Pakistan
can a low-cost car be
made,’’ he insisted.
The motivational talk worked. “We came
back from the meeting all charged up,’’ says
Nagabhushan R. Gubbi, head
of engineering for passenger cars. Gubbi did not
know,
nor did the others, that they had just been
impelled by arguably India’s
most visionary
businessman to create history.
