The car itself was never the star in the Indica saga. The real luminary of Tata Engineering’s automobile ambitions is the striking manufacturing facility where India’s first — and now a second — truly indigenous passenger car finds form and substance.

Spread over 158 acres in the Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial belt near Pune, the plant is probably the most modern and automated installation of its kind in the country. But this standout symbol of Indian engineering is representative of more than just that: it is another example of the Tata vision; it is a story of pluck, skill and discipline; and, crucially, it is about people rather than machines.

Whether on the shop floor, in the managerial offices or the corporate enclaves, there’s a feeling among Tata Engineering employees that the setbacks of the recent past are history and that a future full of exiting possibilities beckons. Driving the good vibrations is the Indica. Though it may not be the company’s biggest money earner, the car’s good health is the clearest indicator that Tata Engineering is on the highway to the promised land.

The Pune plant rolls out, on an average, 350 Indicas a day, six days a week (its record is 393 in a day), but the market is ready for more. "Over the last two months (June and August, 2002), our sales numbers have depended on how many cars we can make, not on whether we can sell them," says J. M. Thatte, general manager (manufacturing).

Quality before quantity
Putting quality ahead of quantity in its manufacturing manual has made the Indica an ace in Tata Engineering’s automotive pack. Ensuring that this quality is reflected in every car that comes off the assembly line is the responsibility of 2,500 shop-floor workers and 552 supervisors and officers. 

As with any large-scale engineering enterprise, the Indica plant operates to a rhythm that can seem awesome and mysterious to the inexperienced eye. But there’s a method in this immense scheme of affairs, and it’s precise, well defined and efficient. The people who make the system work, and the machines that help them do so, share a relationship that is at once complimentary. It helps that the average age of Tata Engineering’s Indica workforce is a mere 28.

There are five different ‘rooms’ or ‘shops’ involved in the production of the Indica: engine and transaxle shop, press room, weld room, paint shop and final assembly, each of them housed in separate blocks. The room or shop tag is a misnomer — the smallest of them, the press room, is spread over nearly 13,000 square meters — but each of these facilities has a unique and vital role to play in shaping the Indica.

Automobile manufacturing does not follow a linear pattern. In the Indica’s case, the engine and transaxle shop makes the engine and the gearbox for the car and transports it to the place where the final assembly takes place. But the body-production procedure moves in single file from one block to another: press room to weld room to paint shop to final assembly, where the newly coloured and tweaked body of the car gets merged with various components.

Engine and transaxle (ETA) shop — the heart makers
Situated at one end of the plant, the ETA building is separated from the other manufacturing blocks by the Indica’s office complex. The standalone location sits well with the character of the ETA wing. Whereas the others blocks have intrinsic links to each other, what the ETA makes bypasses three of them and heads straight to the final assembly shop.

The ETA shop is where the heart of the Indica — the engine and gearbox — is crafted. The engine half of the shop manufactures and assembles the many components that constitute the engine, which is then tested in a special enclosure. The transaxle half is where the gearbox of the Indica gets shape and definition.

Engine shop
There are three broad operational areas here:

• Engine machine shop — This is where the five most critical parts of the engine are made: cylinder block, cylinder head, crankshaft, camshaft and connecting rod.
• Engine assembly — The five critical parts and outsourced components are brought together here. The place where this is done is among the cleanest in the plant, with the temperature maintained at 23^oC to guard against any expansion of the engine-part metals. The cylinder-block and cylinder-head assemblies move in near parallel conveyor lines before being joined in a confluence zone.
• Engine testing — Diesel and petrol engines are checked separately in ‘testing cubicles’ and ‘test beds’ for power, fuel efficiency, smoke, torque and leaks. After the testing operations, the engines are moved to where they will be integrated with the gearbox.

Transaxle shop
Transaxle is the correct term, according to engineers, for what the rest of the world understands as a gearbox. The transaxle shop at the Indica is divided into six areas: soft machining, heat treatment, hard machining, housing, assembly and testing.

The making of the Indica gearbox starts with soft machining, where cutting and allied operations are done on the basic parts (gears) of the transaxle. Once the gears have been cut, they are ‘treated’ with heat. This is a procedure that makes the outside of the gears hard (to make them resilient and long lasting), while keeping their insides soft (to prevent them from cracking under pressure).

After heat treatment the different gear components come to the hard machining section, where they are honed and further cut to correct distortions that are a by-product of the heat-treatment routine. The gearbox and the casings covering it are then put together in an assembly area. A ‘water spider’ — the best worker on the shift and a de facto team leader — coordinates the chores here.

Each gearbox that emerges is given a number for identification before being checked for air seepage, shifting effort, noise levels, etc. After testing these gearboxes are sent to a dispatch area from where battery-operated machines take them to the engines. The gearboxes are attached to the engines at this point.

Once the engine starter and an air-conditioning compressor are added to this fabrication, the finished ‘engine and transaxle’ is ready for the short trip to the final assembly enclosure.

Press room — the shapers
The press shop offers the most spectacular show in the Indica car plant — a 2,000-tonne metal monster crashing down on a thin sheet of steel and giving it a pre-destined shape, the frame for a door, for instance. The sight that precedes this display of brute might is only slightly less impressive: giant robotic arms using vacuum caps to transport prey (the steel sheets) to their rendezvous with programmed violence.

But there’s more to the press room than power and state-of-the-art automation. This is where the inner and outer body of the Indica is moulded by German-made presses that can generate pressures from 800 to 2,000 tonnes in tandem. The pressures thus exerted shape the steel sheets to the specifications of the die cast they are laid out on. The scrape steel that’s generated falls onto an underground conveyor belt which carts it out of the shop.

There are to two lines of five presses each in the press room. One line caters to the outer body (the ‘skin’) of the Indica, the other to the inner. This is the smallest of the blocks in the plant in physical size and manpower requirements, but it plays a big role in defining the Indica, part by body part.

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