The calm winter dust of Malwa, Madhya Pradesh. A cramped figure in racing overalls rushes towards a ditch filled with muck. The chin of his helmet bangs hard against the steering wheel of his cart as he hits the water and loses momentum.
Now blind with runny earth over his motocross goggles, he must coax the wet and sliding wheels of this contraption, engineered by his team, out of the ditch. Its 10hp lawn-mower engine groans, and every extra kilo of weight left on the cart in design wishes it had been machined away.
Also, he must hurry, there are 86 such carts from across the country buzzing around the circuit, driven by hormones and butterflies in stomachs. Indian engineers are used to competition, punishment, and disappointment, but not of this kind.
Domestic IT has powered the enviable output of engineers this millennium in India, and core engineering sectors — the ones responsible for figuring out how to build us better houses and roads and vehicles — have been drawing short straws. It isn’t as if the output is stellar anyway — a 2016 report pegged employability of fresh engineering graduates between 4% and 7%.
The IT industry of the 2000s was ready to put graduates from all streams through the rigours of a common six-month training to get them ready for their coding, testing and project management jobs. The automotive sector did not have this luxury. If cars imagined and built in India were to get better, it needed youngsters who understood the value of a build in a world where gravity worked all the time.
In its 11th year running at the Baja SAEINDIA, each team seems to have an extremely clear understanding of this fact. Over the past year, colleges from all over the country have been readying their race carts, built to the brief provided by the organisers. Here at the National Automotive Testing Tracks in Pithampur just outside Indore, they must now pitch their vehicles to a jury from the industry as a product that’s ready for production.
Industry notices them
A part of the pitch is the final four-hour endurance race over an off-road circuit that has been getting increasingly challenging over the years. And the event seems to be gathering great momentum and attention.
Minister of State for Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises Babul Supriyo flagged it off this year, after a bumpy ATV ride around the circuit that put the palpitating hearts of youngsters at the start line on hold for an hour. The minister rode the ATV himself.
The attention that matters though is the one coming from the industry. The competition allows sponsoring companies to also interview participants and recruit them.
Firms from across the wide automotive design, consultation, manufacturing and ancillary industries have been queuing up to get a chance to speak to the makers and interview them. This also makes the deal more important to participants — 10,000 over the past 11 years have been absorbed into the industry, many are recruited at the event itself, and the mention of participation on the CV seems to be gaining mileage.
On road and off it
The competition format indicates the value of participating. Building the prototype from scratch without help from professional fabricators is only a part of the drill. Teams must also explain the logic of their builds, the cost analysis, and any innovations they may have introduced.
Then there are dynamic tests to determine real-life performance, where they are checked for safety, acceleration and handling. The team must also bring in sponsors, although many students are happy to pay for the opportunity to build a dune buggy and race it in front of possible future employers.
What’s back-breaking though is transport costs for the vehicle and teams — teams from Pune, for instance, are traditionally good at the event because they are an overnight drive away.
But it’s not just about employability. Winning teams from India have also begun to appear in the top 10 regularly at Baja SAE, the larger, global leg of the event where the same vehicles face off against international competition. Knowledge transfer has been a key factor, with 11 years of a rich database of what works and what fails.
More education is coming from the industry itself, through seminars and direct guidance from people working in the automotive sector, to take engineering out of textbooks and into real world challenges.
Sopan Sharma abandoned writing about bikes and cars when he found that humans are funkier. He was at the event on invitation by Mahindra & Mahindra.
