This book has been written because Maruti, a public sector company, established a unique, highly productive work culture and not only put India on wheels but played a large role in the industrial development of the country as well. I had the good fortune to be closely associated with the company from its start, and for that I am grateful both to the Government of India as well as Suzuki Motor Corporation, and its chairman and CEO, Osamu Suzuki. Without the faith they reposed in me, the experiences that shape this book would not have been possible. Osamu Suzuki supported my idea to write this book, and S. Nakanishi, the current managing director of Maruti Suzuki India Limited, provided many documents and information from Japan, since it was not easy to locate all the necessary information either in the records of the ministry or of Maruti. My grateful thanks to them.
While I wanted to record the history of Maruti, I also realized that I would need help to achieve this task. Aroon Purie, currently director of HarperCollins Publishers India and chairman of the India Today group, didn’t hesitate when I mooted the idea and readily agreed to publish this story. My thanks also to Krishan Chopra, Publisher, HarperCollins Publishers India, who found Seetha, my co-author. He was patient with both of us and gently kept up the pressure.
The way this book has shaped up would not have been possible without a whole lot of people who gave us time to share their memories and insights.
Gulzar Kalra and former minister Arun Nehru, who had worked closely with Sanjay Gandhi, helped us reconstruct the run-up to and rationale for the nationalization of Maruti Motors in 1981 and its reincarnation as Maruti Udyog Ltd. V. Krishnamurthy, currently chairman of the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council, who had been given the task of heading Maruti and implementing the project, and D.V. Kapur, then secretary, Ministry of Heavy Industries, Government of India, recollected some of the pulls and pressures that they faced in the early days of the project as well as the policy setting of the 1980s. The former Japanese ambassador to India, Y. Enoki, who had been first secretary and then economic counsellor in the Japanese embassy in the early 1980s, gave us a glimpse into how the MUL–Suzuki Motors partnership was viewed in Japan when it was forged.
A number of persons who worked with Maruti in the early days or were associated with it in some manner provided many valuable inputs. These include Vijay Mathur, D.S. Gupta, Raj Chopra, Surinder Kapur, chairman and managing director of Sona Koyo Steering, and Baba Kalyani, chairman and managing director of Bharat Forge. Amitava Nandy’s razor-sharp memory provided many amusing and insightful anecdotes of the early years.
We are indebted to a whole lot of people in Maruti itself. Indeed, the story of Maruti’s progress may not have been tracked with such details without the help of Krishan Kumar, S. Maitra, Mayank Pareek, M.M. Singh, Ramesh Krishnan and S.Y. Siddiqui. Many gaps in factual information needed to be filled. Rahul Bharti and his team patiently dug out old records, annual reports and facts and figures we kept asking for.
The perils of trying to reconstruct current history, we found, lay in trying to get old records. After being told by an official of the National Archives that he could get us any document before 1947 and perhaps till the 1960s, but could make no promises about documents after the 1970s, we had almost given up hope of finding any government papers relating to Maruti. Two people came like a godsend. R.C. Joshi, director in the Press Information Bureau, somehow traced the speech Mrs Indira Gandhi had given when she inaugurated the Maruti factory. And Nagesh Singh, advisor in the Planning Commission, remembered where in Yojana Bhavan the Project Appraisal Division’s highly sceptical note on the Maruti project could be found.
A book which spans the history of a company for a period in excess of twenty-five years cannot be written without a great deal of help from a large number of people. We seek the understanding and forgiveness of others who have provided help but have not been mentioned here.