What Punjab’s ‘Jugaad’ Rehris Can Teach the DRDO About Engines

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 foreign powerplants.

Lack of staying power

Meanwhile, the Kaveri engine, intended by the DRDO’s Gas Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE) for India’s indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) – now the Tejas – is perhaps the most enduring monument to the organisation’s failure in delivering a dependable indigenous fighter powerpack.

Conceived in the early 1980s, the turbofan consumed decades of development and some Rs 2,032 crores before being formally divorced from the Tejas programme in 2007–08 after failing to meet its requirements. It produced only 70–72 kN (kilonewton) of afterburning thrust, against the required 83–85 kN, while struggling with excessive weight, turbine-blade durability, compressor performance, afterburner efficiency, engine-control systems and high-altitude efficiency.

After nine prototypes, four core engines and more than 3,000 hours of ground and aerial testing in Russia, the DRDO’s Tejas programme ultimately adopted the US-origin General Electric F404-IN20 powerpack, while the Kaveri was repurposed for other applications, but lingers in assorted developmental forms. The consequences of that fiasco are no longer merely an engineering embarrassment, but have left Tejas dependent on a foreign powerplant, making its production, availability and future development helplessly vulnerable to an external supplier for its single most critical component.

More broadly, the propulsion deficit is not confined to India’s military sector but has deep roots in civilian industry too. Dating back to the 1950s, Italian-origin Vespa and Lambretta scooters, for instance, in addition to Fiat and Ambassador cars, tractors, locomotives and almost all other vehicles, depended on imported or licence-built engines. Indian manufacturers gradually localised, adapted and improved these powerplants, but creating an engine from scratch repeatedly proved futile. The pattern of building the machine while relying on foreign technology for its engine has therefore proved remarkably persistent and, in various forms, continues even today.

But the Rehri was a striking exception to that pattern – not because it involved sophisticated technology, but because its makers simply built a workable powerplant from whatever was at hand. Rough-hewn and noisy, and in flagrant violation of almost every textbook rule of automotive engineering, it became a remarkably versatile workhorse, doubling as a farm-produce haulier and rural taxi and carrying almost anything that needed transporting. It travelled miraculously at a dizzying 40–45 km/h on pitted village roads and dirt tracks, could haul 20–30 people at a time, including drunken revellers returning from weddings or heading to village fairs, along with livestock, grain, fertiliser and other local produce.

Gearboxes, radiators and other refinements followed, gradually transforming an irrigation pump-set and assorted scrap into a durable vehicle that became an unlikely contributor to Punjab’s rural economy. “The instinct to solve the engineering problem of making the Rehri work, rather than explain why it cannot, stands in striking contrast to India’s defence-industrial establishment, where vastly greater resources, expertise and infrastructure have too often gone into explaining why engines are difficult to design,” said a senior private aviation industry official.

Necessity, he said, requesting anonymity, was Punjab’s mechanics’ ‘unforgiving taskmaster’. Failure for them was not an option, for if the contraption did not move, it earned neither its keep nor its owner’s livelihood. By comparison, numerous failed DRDO developments like engines lingered on for decades, their shortcomings carried into the next unfulfilled promise, rather than resolved, he added.

Once a familiar sight across Punjab – and a contentious issue with state transport authorities there as well as in neighbouring Haryana, Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh, to which it later spread – these Rehris are now largely relics, displaced by tractors and other vehicles. But what disappeared with the Rehris was more than an ingenious rural means of transportation: it marked the demise of a practical approach to problem-solving, of improvising with whatever was available and persisting until the contraption worked. This is precisely the mindset that India’s vastly more technologically advanced defence establishment has struggled to replicate in developing indigenous propulsion.

 That shortcoming presently carries serious strategic consequences.

India's propulsion bind

In recent months, supplies of the GE F404—the Tejas’s fallback powerplant after Kaveri’s failure—have proved problematic, adversely impacting series production of the upgraded Tejas Mk1A variant and, consequently, doing little to arrest the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) fighter-squadron decline, whose numbers hover at around 29 against a sanctioned strength of 42. 

The continuing F404 supply disruption has also amply demonstrated how dependence on a foreign powerplant can directly constrain IAF operational capability—a vulnerability underscored by Air Chief Marshal A. P. Singh’s public criticism of delays in Tejas Mk1A deliveries.

More troublingly, the problem deepens even further with the more powerful 98-kN GE F414-INS6, successor to the F404 and intended to power India’s next generation of combat aircraft, having become another propulsion headache.

Shortlisted to power the upgraded Tejas Mk2 variant and the under-development fifth-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), India’s most ambitious fighter programme, and the Indian Navy’s (IN’s) Twin Engine Deck-Based Fighter (TEDBF), the F414 powerplant has run into difficulties over both its manufacture in India and its procurement for the initial aircraft.

The HAL–GE agreement to manufacture the F-414 in India, announced in 2023, is bogged down over technology transfer, intellectual property and GE’s retention of critical know-how, including elements of the hot section. Separately, the DRDO and its Aeronautical Development Agency have reportedly struggled to finalise the purchase of around 15 F414s for the AMCA and TEDBF prototypes, with the reported price of each engine rising from Rs 70-80 crore to more than Rs 200 crore.

The problem is further compounded by the AMCA having been designed around the F414, which is already factored into its airframe, propulsion integration, software, flight-control systems, performance parameters, testing and certification. Replacing it would entail a substantial redesign, fresh integration and extensive testing – not only delaying an already ambitious programme by years beyond its 2035 deadline, but adding potentially enormous costs to a project already running into thousands of crores.

Consequently, India is caught in an unenviable ‘propulsion bind’: the engine it needs to get the AMCA into the air is foreign, expensive and proving difficult to manufacture locally, while changing it could be even more expensive and time-consuming.

India's continued overseas reliance

It is against this conundrum that, on August 14, Britain’s Rolls-Royce entered the AMCA engine contest in partnership with Reliance Industries, proposing to jointly develop and manufacture a new 120-kN-plus powerplant locally. Unlike GE, media reports indicated that Rolls-Royce is offering India 100% technology transfer, including intellectual property generated under the programme, rather than merely access to a foreign-designed powerplant.

France's Safran Aircraft Engines is pursuing a similar strategy for the AMCA’s fixed-wing propulsion, while its separate helicopter-engine arm, Safran Helicopter Engines, has already moved from long-standing cooperation with HAL to a contracted co-development programme. 

On August 26, HAL and Safran Helicopter Engines, through their jointly owned SAFHAL venture, signed a contract to jointly design, develop and manufacture the 3,500–4,000-shp Aravalli turboshaft for HAL’s 13-tonne Indian Multi-Role Helicopter (IMRH) and naval Deck-Based Multi-Role Helicopter (DBMRH). SAFHAL will also handle its planned supply and lifecycle support.

HAL and Safran’s rotary-wing propulsion relationship stretches back to 1962, when Turbomeca, now part of Safran, licensed HAL to manufacture the Artouste IIIB turboshaft in India for the Chetak (Aérospatiale Alouette III) and subsequently the Cheetah (SA 315B Lama) helicopters. Thereafter, Safran’s relationship with HAL advanced to the Shakti engine, a 1,400-shp turboshaft co-developed by HAL and Turbomeca for the DRDO-designed Dhruv Advanced Light Helicopter and its multiple derivatives, including the Light Combat Helicopter. Aravalli now takes that progression another step further – from licensed manufacture to joint development of a substantially more powerful foreign helicopter engine.

Meanwhile, in a related development, the UK is assisting India in developing naval electric propulsion, drawing on the Royal Navy’s experience with this technology. The two countries are believed to be preparing an inter-governmental agreement for Integrated Full Electric Propulsion (IFEP) for four IN Landing Platform Docks, with the US’s GE Power Conversion and India’s state-owned Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited establishing the country’s first land-based testing facility for the system. GE Power Conversion’s role derives from its work on the RN’s electric-propulsion systems, including those installed on its Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers.

But such reliance on overseas military engine technology carries serious consequences, as it can determine a platform’s availability, maintenance, upgrades and even its future development for decades, leaving operational capability hostage to decisions taken outside India. That vulnerability brings us right back to Punjab’s Rehri mechanics, whose enduring lesson was the value of self-sufficiency and retaining control over the solution, improvising with what is available and never relying on overseas assistance to find it.

Mr Jugaad

As a postscript, an apocryphal tale that once circulated in Punjab’s Rehri mechanic circles is worth retelling. During US President George W. Bush’s visit to Delhi in 2006, the story goes, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked whether he had any special requests. Bush supposedly replied, entirely seriously, that he wanted to meet “Mr Jugaad”, having heard in his pre-visit briefings in Washington that this mysterious individual was responsible for much of India’s innovative flair – something the US president apparently hoped to replicate back home.

Perhaps Singh should, in all impish innocence, have arranged for Bush to meet a Punjab Rehri fabricator, introduced him as Mr Jugaad, and suggested that the US president commission him to build something for America. After all, if these genies could turn a discarded irrigation pump-set, some scrap and a little stubbornness into a working vehicle, who knows what they might have done with an American budget?

It might have been instructive for POTUS – and considerably more lucrative for Punjab’s mechanics and possibly, even inspired the DRDO to rediscover the virtues of self-reliance and the determination to make things work.