REBUILDING INDIAN MANUFACTURING

From steam hammers to AI systems, the Bharat Forge chairman reflects on five decades of transformation, technology, and the urgency of India's manufacturing moment.

- By Amit Shanbaug & Nisha Shukla

When Baba Kalyani walks into a room, he carries with him not just the gravitas of an industrialist who's spent more than half a century at the helm of one of India's most storied engineering firms, but also the rare clarity of someone who's watched India's manufacturing destiny evolve, one hard-fought transition at a time.

Kalyani joined Bharat Forge in 1972, a time he remembers vividly. "It was all muscle power," he says, half smiling. "No automation, no robotics, not even CNC machines back then." It was an era when heavy manufacturing was defined by brute strength, and technology was still a luxury in most Indian shop floors.

Over five decades later, he still walks the factory floor, but the world has changed. "Now it's all brain power," he says, "and soon it will be something more intelligence that's not just human but augmented."

This long journey, from industrial muscle to Al-powered machinery, has been nothing short of revolutionary. But for Kalyani, this is more than a story about a company's evolution, it is about an entire country finding its place in the global manufacturing chain and doing so with a renewed sense of purpose.

"We haven't completed the transformation," he says with characteristic humility. "It's still a pivot in progress." For Bharat Forge, that pivot began nearly a decade ago, when Kalyani and his team made a conscious decision to move beyond traditional forging and become a diversified technology company. "We had to," he says. "Everything is changing—the way we design, the way we engineer, even the way we think."