Vinod Mehta, in his book on Sanjay Gandhi, quotes from the Sunday Times (of London) report on the Maruti factory from April 1977: “The body shop where the workers apparently hand-stitched the little Maruti bodies is a joke. So also is the engine shop, the pattern shop and the foundry, and the whole place with three ground level fireplaces looks like a dirty indoor barbecue.”

Mehta estimates that total investment couldn’t have topped Rs 6 crore — for a project that needed at least ten times as much. When the government had discussed with Renault and other international majors for a public sector ‘people’s car’ project, the costs were estimated at Rs 57 crore.

But underfunding wasn’t the main problem. The bigger problem was that of Sanjay Gandhi’s attitude. With an incomplete Rolls-Royce apprenticeship, Sanjay believed that he knew all that he needed to know about car-making. In 1971, Sanjay Gandhi went to Europe and toured several car manufacturing ventures and came away convinced that there was nothing that he didn’t already know about the auto business.

When the first Maruti prototype was unveiled (in November 1972), Sanjay promised that the first commercial production cars would roll out just five months later, by April 1973. In 1974, after Maruti had received its VRDE certification, the car was supposed to be at “the threshold of production.”

In the May 25th, 1975, issue of The Illustrated Weekly of India, veteran editor Khushwant Singh wrote about his visit to the Maruti factory, where he went for a short spin in one of the pre-production cars: “I take the wheel. Sanjay sits beside me. The gear is on the floor. As I release the clutch, it lurches forward. Although it has only two cylinders and 8.3 horse-power, it responds to the pressure of the accelerator like a more powerful car. Its steering is also more sensitive to the touch and makes the wheels turn with greater alacrity than the steering-wheel of any car I’ve driven.

“Despite its minuscule size, it holds the road very well and attains its maximum speed of 110 km per hour without overstretching itself. I take the 60-degree bends at 60 kilometres per hour with the greatest of ease. My fear that it has too low a clearance for the rough Indian roads is soon dispelled. Sanjay takes over himself and drives it at breakneck speed over bush, brier and mound.”

A great fan and defender of Sanjay Gandhi, Khushwant Singh did question, “How the Maruti will last remains to be seen.” He also succinctly pointed out that the car was no more a ‘people’s car’ “because it will cost Rs 25,000 (ex-factory is Rs 16,500; in Haryana Rs 21,000). Nevertheless, it will be Rs 5-10,000 less than any of the three Indian cars in the market.”

Overall, Khushwant Singh was very positive: “Soon little Marutis should be seen on the roads of Haryana and Delhi; and a month or two later they will be running between Kalimpong and Kanyakumari.”

But that didn’t happen at all, not with Sanjay Gandhi’s Maruti.

Emergency was imposed in June 1975. Sanjay Gandhi had other matters to attend to. In the meantime, to generate some business another entity, Maruti Heavy Vehicles was constituted to make bus bodies and road rollers. During Emergency, business was good for Maruti Heavy Vehicles, but with Emergency coming to an end, business collapsed. With the Janata Party coalition voted to power, a series of enquiries against the Gandhi family and Maruti ensued. When, on March 06, 1978, the High Court of Punjab and Haryana ordered the winding up of Maruti Motors, not more than 40 Marutis, at most, may have been made.

In January 1980, the Congress party came back to power, and Indira Gandhi was back in the driving seat. Apparently, Sanjay was very excited about the possibility of reviving Maruti. But then fate had other plans. On June 23, 1980, Sanjay Gandhi crashed whilst flying a Pitts aircraft, and was killed instantly.

India's first small car project had a lot of promise, and given the kind of proximity it had to the powers that be, this venture should never have failed! But then making a car is not all that easy. Making a body and giving it wheels was the easier part of the job as most of the bits and pieces came from the other automobiles that were being made in India or elsewhere. Putting that into series production was another matter.

And then there was this little matter of the powerpack. For the pre-production prototypes Sanjay resorted to using imported motorcycle engines that were matched to a four-speed gearbox, which also must have been sourced from somewhere. All very well for pre-production cars, but what about production cars? That's when the project struck a roadblock, specifically the powerpack bit. The understanding was that the Indian ‘people's car’ was to be built indigenously with all major and minor components of the vehicle being produced in the country. It was on this premise that Sanjay Gandhi was the only one to receive a new licence to manufacture cars.

Excerpted from ‘A Million Cars for a Billion People’ authored by

Gautam Sen

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