The Hinduja Automotive vice-chariman recounts to Sushila Ravindranath how he moved from working in the auto sector

in the US to the Tata Nano project in India, and why he feels a twinge of nostalgia whenever he sees an Alfa Romeo V Sumantran, executive vice-chairman of Hinduja Automotive (the holding company of Ashok Leyland), and chairman of Nissan Ashok Leyland Powertrain, has been passionate about automobiles all his life. He has designed and worked on all kinds of automobiles and has held multiple simultaneous responsibilities his entire career. Among other things, he serves on the board of IIT Madras Research Park, and is a distinguished professor at IIT. He has recently been inducted into the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council. Sumantran has just helped launch the first product from Ashok Leyland?s joint venture with Nissan, the Dost mini-truck, which is being promoted as an Indian product with Japanese quality. ?It has been received very well,? he says. There are bookings to cover the next four months. The challenge will be to ramp up production to meet demand. Time and traffic constraints make us agree to meet at the elegant Hinduja guest house at the Tony Boat Club Road for coffee. We are served hot samosas and some nicely toasted masala peanuts.

Sumantran started his career with General Motors in Detroit, where he worked for 16 years. He came back to India when Ratan Tata handpicked him to work on the Nano project, where he spent five years, and now he is with Hinduja Automotive. Strangely, Sumantran did not particularly want to make his career in cars although he is crazy about them. He is an aerospace engineer from IIT Madras, who went to the US to do his masters in Princeton and his PhD in aerodynamics from Virginia Tech. A year away from his doctoral degree, a friend persuaded him to meet GM, who offered him a job instantly. He demurred as he had to complete his thesis and GM was willing to wait for a year. ?I finished at the university on a Friday and started work the next Monday,? he laughs. He was assigned to GM Research Laboratories. The head of the labs, Bob Frosch, believed in hiring bright people and letting them swim in a sea of ideas. ?R&D has today shifted from those liberal days and has become bottom-line driven,? he says, recalling those days.

The challenge for GM was to catch up with Toyota. It had to learn to reduce the time taken to develop a new model from 47 months to 24 months. It had to make some fundamental changes in the organisational structure, developmental activities and also layout of the units. ?Being in the R&D team exposed me to the breadth of the industry. It was a blend of left brain and right brain activities.? The GM management during this time decided that it was difficult to assimilate all that was being done in the labs in such a large set up as GM. So GM decided to prototype it in a smaller company. GM had just taken over Saab in Sweden, and Sumantran was sent to Europe. This was also during the time of the GM-Fiat alliance. He ended up doing three jobs at the same time.

He was the head of engineering in Saab, chief engineer for the GM-Fiat premium platform, and the single voice for R&D. ?It was hectic, but also very educational. I learnt to manage JVs and also relationships across boundaries.? He had to deal with Germans, Italians, Japanese, Australians and Americans. Unfortunately, the GM-Fiat partnership did not work well. The premium platform was torn apart. ?Whenever I see an Alfa Romeo 195 I see traces of the platform we built.? In spite of the fact that these break ups are hugely disruptive, Sumantran did have fun during those years.

Then came a call from Ratan Tata. ?My wife and I wanted to come back. We never put down roots overseas.? Tata?s car project was something that caught Sumantran?s imagination. ?This was another great challenge. Indica had just been launched, and had had a rough bruising first year.? He joined Tata Motors as executive director, passenger car business & engineering research centre. A six-point agenda was drawn up for the Indica V2. Quality was given prime importance. Production was scaled up. ?In this industry, you cannot survive without scale.? In his first year with Tata Motors he put everything in place for increasing production. It meant planning product variety, amount of investment, alliance strategy, partnerships and leveraging common investment. There were very little quality hitches in the Indigo that came out in 2002. In three months, that Indica model reached the number one position in the C category of sedans, taking on Hyundai?s Accent and Ford?s Ikon, and stayed their for 36 months.

Sumantran was with Tata Motors till 2005, where he oversaw a monolithic product development structure turning into a matrix organisation. Much more organisational capability was introduced in managing three or four platforms at the same time and handling new product introduction processes. This was the time when work on the Nano started. ?Nano was the cheapest car ever to be produced and on the other side there was Aria, which was the most expensive. Between 2001 and 2006, so much happened that we created an entirely new set of rules.?

In 2006, Sumantran shifted to Chennai and, after consulting with Ashok Leyland and the Hinduja Group, joined the board of the holding company as the executive vice-chairman. His hands continue to be more than full. ?This is a different kind of challenge. Now, commercial vehicles are becoming like passenger cars. We have to build huge capabilities. The vehicles are becoming more sophisticated. We have to shore up domestic business.? As the commercial vehicle industry is of cyclical nature, the group has started looking at non-cyclical areas of diversification. After 15 years in the business, manufacturing for defence has been spun into a separate business. There has been a spurt of overseas acquisitions, such as Avia, a Czech aircraft and automotive company, a bus plant near Dubai and 26% of bus company Optare in the UK, among others. ?We have tied up with John Deere for construction equipment as infrastructure will be a growth area and in the next few months will roll out high value equipment.? Then there is a joint venture with German Continental for vehicle electronics, acquisition of Albonair, again in Germany, for environmental technologies, and the American Defiance for knowledge systems integration.

Does the man relax at all? ?Of course I have other interests. But they are all related to my passion, cars,? he says. Sumantran has a pilot?s licence, loves bikes and is a qualified race car driver!

Rushing off to the Formula 1 race in Noida was the priority on his crowded agenda.