Viraj Salgaonkar

Picture a roaring, icy river slicing through the isolated Spiti Valley in 1972. The local villagers are completely cut off by a mountain collapse. The military says a traditional concrete/riveted steel bridge will take yrs to bring heavy machinery up the treacherous cliffs. Then, a young woman steps out onto the frozen mud wearing a hard hat, carrying a set of rolled up blueprints under her arm. She does not have bulldozers. She does not have massive cranes. Instead, she brings trucks loaded with small, lightweight steel components, like a adult-sized structural Lego set. In just 4 months, w/o a single piece of heavy machinery, her team hand-assembles a rock-solid, load-bearing steel bridge across the gorge. Her name was Shakuntala Bhagat & she was changing the rules of civil engineering forever. Born in 1933, Shakuntala was the daughter of S.B. Joshi, a legendary figure known as the "Father of Bridge Engineering in India". While other young girls of the 1940s were expected to follow quiet, traditional paths, Shakuntala spent her childhood staring at bridge trusses & stress diagrams. In 1949, she walked into the classrooms of VJTI in Bombay. The lecture hall went dead silent. Dozens of male students turned to stare at the only woman in the room. In 1953, at just 20 yrs old, she walked out with a degree, making history as India’s 1st female civil engineer. She flew to the United States, earned her Master's in Structural Engineering from Penn & trained across Germany & the UK. When she returned home in the 1960s, she joined IIT Bombay as an Assistant Prof, taking charge as the Head of the Heavy Structures Lab. At IIT Bombay, Prof. Shakuntala was obsessed with a single problem: Why did Indian infra take so long to build?Traditional steel bridges relied on slow, dangerous, on-site welding & heavy riveting. If a flood wiped out a road in Arunachal Pradesh/Kashmir, cut-off communities had to wait yrs for a replacement bridge. In the late 1960s, turning her small Bombay apartment into a late night workshop littered with steel prototypes & stress formulas, Shakuntala & her engineer husband, Anirudh Bhagat, cracked the code. They invented & patented the Quadricon Modular Bridge System & the Bhagat Unishear Connector. Instead of custom-casting a bridge for every river, their system used mass-produced, interchangeable, lightweight steel modules. They could be packed onto small trucks, hauled up narrow mountain tracks & assembled on-site using simple hand tools, reducing bridge construction time from yrs to weeks. Yet, when they took this revolutionary idea to institutional investors & govt departments for R&D funding, they were met with cold skepticism. "If advanced Western nations have not developed a total-system modular steel bridge like this, how can an Indian couple do it?" The establishment refused to back them. She & her husband took massive personal financial risks, mortgaging their own assets to build & test the prototypes themselves. In 1972, the Invention Promotion Board awarded them the highest honor for the Unishear connector. The skeptics were forced to eat their words. Shahkuntala Bhagat went on to design & oversee the construction of 200+ Quadricon steel bridges worldwide, including 69 vital superstructures across India’s most dangerous border terrains, from the high passes of Kashmir to the dense forests of Arunachal Pradesh, as well as projects in the US, the UK & Germany. In 1993, she was named Woman Engineer of the Year. When she passed away in 2012 at the age of 79, she left behind an army of students & a country connected by her steel. We celebrate the famous monuments of concrete and glass in our metros, yet few history books mention the woman in a hard hat who stood on freezing riverbeds to connect India's most forgotten corners. The next time you travel through a remote mountain pass in the Himalayas & your vehicle rolls smoothly over a steel bridge spanning a deadly gorge, look closely at the steel joints beneath you. You are driving across the indestructible genius of Shakuntala Bhagat.

If an Indian startup/defense firm wants to build rocket engines/satellite parts/surgical implants/advanced drone components, they need sub-micron precision metal parts made from heavy-duty alloys like Titanium & Inconel. Historically, the ultra-precise 5-axis CNC machines required to carve these complex 3D parts had to be imported from countries like Germany/Japan/Switzerland at astronomical costs. To make matters worse, foreign suppliers face tight export controls on high-precision machining tech due to its dual-use potential in defense/missiles. India had the engineering talent to design hardware, but was held back by a reliance on imported tooling & machining infrastructure. A not so known startup Ethereal Machines is doing genuinely game-changing work for Indian deeptech & manufacturing, operating in a sector that rarely gets flashy headline attention compared to consumer tech. Founded by Kaushik Mudda & Navin Jain out of RVCE in BLR, they hit on a fundamental bottleneck that was quietly crippling India’s hardware, aerospace & defense ecosystem. Instead of just buying machines, Ethereal built their own multi-axis CNC machines from the ground up in India including their proprietary hardware, mechanics & complex CNC controller software. 🙏🙏 They built flagship proprietary machines like Halo, Aura & Nimbus that deliver sub 10 micron precision allowing intricate metal geometries to be carved in a single setup w/o manually repositioning the raw block. Their early breakthrough was combining 3D printing (adding material) & multi-axis CNC milling (carving material away) into a single machine platform. Instead of just selling machines, they run a massive 50K+ sq ft Smart Factory in Peenya, BLR operating 24/7. Startups in spacetech, drone tech, semiconductor equipment & medical devices can upload CAD designs & get aerospace-grade precision components delivered in days instead of months, cutting customer lead times by ~40%. They became the 1st Indian company to win a CES "Best of Innovation" Award in Las Vegas for their hybrid manufacturing tech. By controlling both the hardware & the software behind multi-axis machining, they give India's spacetech & defense ecosystem a local manufacturing fallback that cannot be disrupted by global supply chain shocks/export bans. Top-tier deeptech investors like Peak XV Partners, Blume Ventures & Avataar Ventures backed them with major Series A & B funding rounds to set up a massive 300K sq. ft. mega-factory outside BLR. Most people think of "Indian tech" as SaaS apps/fintech/q-com, Ethereal Machines is doing the heavy, unglamorous lifting, building the physical machine tools required to manufacture the rockets, drones, medical implants & chips of tomorrow right inside India. 🙏🙏

The global aviation community was stunned. The Americans who built the plane were left speechless. Indian engineers & a fearless pilot had taken a foreign cargo plane, bolted a fighter engine to its roof & rewritten the rules of physics in the sky. It is July 23, 1962. The jagged, barren wasteland of the Karakoram Range looks like the surface of the moon. In the valley below, a crude, unpaved strip of dirt & loose gravel sits frozen in the Karakoram Pass. This is Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO): the highest advanced landing ground on Earth. Tensions with China are simmering to a boil. The Indian Army jawans stationed on this freezing frontier are completely cut off. They need men, they need ammunition & they need them yesterday. But conventional military wisdom says flying a massive, heavy transport plane into DBO is a suicide mission. The air is too thin to create lift. The dirt strip is too short to stop. The Western aviation world had already given its verdict: Impossible. They did not account for Indian ingenuity & they certainly did not account for Squadron Leader C.K.S. Raje. On the tarmac at Jammu, a twin-boom Fairchild C-119G Packet transport plane affectionately known as the "Flying Boxcar" idles. But this is not a standard American-built cargo plane anymore. Perched precariously on top of its fuselage, like a rocket backpack, is a raw, unshielded British-designed Orpheus 701 jet engine, ripped straight out of a Folland Gnat fighter jet. This mechanical chimera is the brainchild of Indian maintenance engineers & the fledgling GTRE. It is an unproven, terrifying gamble. If the jet engine fails/if its immense thrust rips the roof off the fuselage, the plane will disintegrate. Climbing into the cockpit is Squadron Leader Raje. Walking in right behind him are 32 battle-ready jawans loaded with full gear & Air Vice Marshal Erlic Pinto, the chief of Western Air Command, who refuses to let his men take a risk he will not take himself. The props blur into motion. The piston engines roar. The modified Packet lifts off, heavily clawing its way toward the roof of the world. As Raje navigates the treacherous Himalayan peaks, the true nightmare begins. The air is so thin that the Packet’s twin piston engines begin to gasp for oxygen, losing power. The control columns vibrate violently. Below them, DBO appears, a tiny, dusty brown ribbon surrounded by lethal mountain walls. There are no air traffic controllers, no radar, no paved runways. Just a strip of loose earth. Raje throttles back. The massive plane drops like a stone through the thin air, bouncing violently as its tires slam into the gravel of DBO. Dust explodes around the fuselage. The brakes screech, fighting the loose rocks, throwing the passengers forward against their harnesses. Against all mathematical odds, they stop. The doors fly open. The icy Himalayan wind rushes in & 32 jawans step out onto the highest battlefield on earth. But landing was only half the battle. The real terror is the takeoff. To get a heavy transport plane off the ground at 16700 feet, you need speed that the thin air physically denies you. The runway is too short. The mountain at the end of the strip is rushing closer by the second. Raje lines up the Packet. He pushes the piston engine throttles to the absolute wall. The plane starts rolling, but it is sluggish, heavy, dragging through the gravel.100 meters... 200 meters... the end of the strip is coming up at terrifying speed. The plane is not lifting. It is a dead weight. Raje reaches for a custom-built switch on the panel. The Jet Toggle. He flips it. With a deafening, supersonic shriek that echoes across the Karakoram range, the Orpheus jet engine on the roof ignites. 20 kN of pure, unadulterated jet thrust punches the cargo plane from behind. A massive column of flame & jet wash erupts over the tail. The Packet does not just accelerate, it rockets. The front wheel lifts off the gravel just as the runway runs out. The massive cargo plane claws, screams & blasts its way into the sky, clearing the jagged mountain peaks by a matter of yards. When Raje touched down back at base on July 23, 1962, he had not just completed a supply run. He had shattered a world record for the highest take-off & landing by a transport aircraft in aviation history.