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Chandigarh: Undoubtedly, one of the most glaring and enduring failures of India’s defence industry has been its inability to develop and field dependable indigenous propulsion for all major military platforms it has designed – from fighters and helicopters to tanks, infantry combat vehicles, warships, including an aircraft carrier and even unmanned aerial systems.

Yet, this is precisely the sort of basic engineering problem that Punjab’s ingenious small-town and village mechanics confronted and resolved decades ago, albeit in a far more humble form. Their homespun answer emerged in the late 1980s in the form of the locally dubbed ‘Jugaad Rehri’ – drolly known as Maruta, Gharukka or Chali (40) – a crudely ingenious transport vehicle built on a long wooden four-wheel chassis and powered by a repurposed, juddering 10-14-horsepower diesel irrigation pump-set.

Its steering wheels and other components were cannibalised from abandoned jeeps, cars and trucks, while a belt-and-camshaft arrangement transmitted power to the rear wheels, all bolted, welded and improvised onto the frame. But what distinguished its makers was an indomitable entrepreneurial drive to make the contraption work: modify, adapt, try again – that was the makers’ simple, relentless formula for success.

In the process, they experimented, modified and adapted relentlessly. When something went wrong, they altered it; when a component was unavailable, they found a substitute; when an arrangement failed, they tried another. Working with little more than basic tools, mechanical resourcefulness and whatever scrap they could lay their hands on, they gradually turned a collection of discarded parts into a remarkably durable and versatile vehicle.

Thereafter, for decades, until around 2010, these whacky contraptions, initially costing around Rs 50,000–75,000 each, were a fixture of Punjab’s rural life in an era when motor vehicles were scarce and, for the times, expensive. Intriguingly, in some villages across Punjab’s Malwa belt – the state’s vast southern agricultural region encompassing Ludhiana, Moga, Sangrur, Bathinda, Mansa and Ferozepur districts – where Rehris proliferated, their broad wooden sides even doubled as blackboards for night school classes.

A ‘jugaad’ vehicle in Rajasthan. Photo: Rajesh Karkera/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0.

There is, of course, no serious equivalence between a rural diesel pump-set-turned-powerpack and a modern military engine. Comparing the two literally would be fanciful, even ridiculous: one is a crude agricultural machine cobbled onto a wooden cart, while the other is a brutally complex machine operating at the outer limits of engineering, where extreme temperatures, pressures and microscopic tolerances leave little room for improvisation.

The comparison, however, is not about the machines but about the approach to solving engineering problems. That is what makes the Rehri’s story uncomfortable for India’s state-run Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), whose approach to comparable challenges could scarcely be more different from that of Punjab’s mechanics 

The DRDO has over 45 hi-tech laboratories, thousands of scientists, engineers and technologists and billions of rupees in public funding. It also has access to wind tunnels, computational fluid dynamics programmes, advanced materials research, precision manufacturing, high-temperature metallurgy, test beds, flying test beds, and certification facilities.

But what it conspicuously lacks is the ‘staying power’ to execute the arduous business of developing engines for the multiple air, land and maritime platforms it has designed and which are being series-built locally, but with........

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