The Little-Known 'Formula' Transforming 'Bharat's' Engineering Talent

How often we hear industry folks say Indian graduates are unemployable. They speak from experience, often being present in eagerness at the gates of graduation to welcome students into a significant — and likely the longest — chapter of their lives, only to come away thinking, ‘They are not ready yet.’

According to the Economic Survey 2024, only 51.25 per cent — or roughly 1 in 2 — of India's graduates are employable. If this sounds bad please know that this is actually a vast improvement over the past decade when a mere 34 per cent of the graduates were deemed employable.

Other surveys (here and here) paint a considerably more unflattering picture (here and here).

The numbers are rising, if we don’t mind false consolation. According to the India Skills Report 2025, the share of employable graduates this year is 54.81 per cent.

The expectation is that this curve will continue to climb. However, neither the actual numbers nor the rate of change is satisfying enough for a confident country with soaring ambitions and whose industry is hungry to grow, as well as compete and win on the global stage.

Engineering in particular will be key to India’s rise from a developing country to a developed one. Engineering graduates will be the daring foot soldiers in India’s ‘Make in India’, ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’, and ‘Viksit Bharat’ marches in the future. In light of that, employability among the Bachelor of Engineering or Technology (BE/BTech) graduates is a decent 71.50 per cent in 2025.

While this is a healthy share in comparison to the Bachelor of Science (BSc, 58 per cent), Bachelor of Arts (BA, 54 per cent), and Bachelor of Commerce (BCom, 55 per cent) graduates, there is huge room for improvement (though some students might disagree), especially since these figures signify quantities and not what’s equally, if not more, important — quality.

Calls have been made for “lateral thinking and out-of-the-box initiatives,” as this 2020 case study did while experimenting with “experiential learning programs and competitive programming,” to improve the employability of engineering graduates.

Interestingly, an out-of-the-box initiative that demands lateral thinking from undergraduate engineering students has been quietly in motion in India for nearly a decade. It has been elevating engineering education to heights virtually unknown to the average engineering student and preparing students for a fulfilling career in engineering.

Participants in this event have gone on to work for top-notch engineering companies not just in India but around the world, and some have even started their own companies. And so, it’s been quietly presenting a little-known ‘Formula’ for ‘Bharat’ that, if emulated on a wider scale and in a variety of different forms, could help produce well-rounded engineering graduates in service of nation building.

‘Formula Bharat’

It's January 2017 — those good, old pre-pandemic days. The place is a race track in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. The excitement is palpable, tinged naturally with nervousness of the good kind.

A competitive engineering event is about to kick off, one where eager students from across India congregate to compete, equipped with a technical know-how stretching far beyond the confines of the ordinary engineering coursework but perhaps more excitingly, armed with sleek, life-size, open-wheeled race cars — virtually self-made.

This was the start of “Formula Bharat,” where over 70 engineering student teams had turned up to compete with their own Formula-style combustion vehicles.

Formula Bharat is India’s own attempt at an engineering design competition along the lines of its global peers that aim to challenge student teams to design, build, and race Formula-style cars.

The term “Formula” in the context of race cars might spark thoughts of Formula 1, 2, 3, 4, and E racing. F1 and its lower-order variants are professional motorsport categories of racing held by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). Today, F1 is the most popular sport in the world, with 75 crore fans, 41 per cent of whom are women.

Formula Student competitions, while drawing inspiration and energy from Formula racing, have different aims. The participants are not professional engineers but university students, and the focus is less on racing and more on the design and engineering of a Formula-style race car.

The teams are judged on the basis of engineering design, cost efficiency, business presentation, and the dynamic performance of the car — aspects like acceleration, handling, and endurance — rather than who finishes the race in what order.

Formula SAE was the trailblazer event. The original Formula Student competition was initiated in 1981 by Ron Matthews, then an untenured assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, United States (US).

Matthews had launched a student branch of the SAE (short for the Society of Automotive Engineers) in 1980 before organising the inaugural Formula SAE race the next year — a successor to the unsuccessful SAE Mini Indy asphalt racing competition. The new competition met with success.

Inspired by the rise of Formula SAE in the 1980s, a whole host of “Formula Student competitions” cropped up around the world. The term “Formula” that headlines the names of these events refers to a set of rules and regulations that govern the design, engineering, and racing of the vehicles in these competitions. Today, 25 countries host Formula Student competitions annually.

India’s own Formula Bharat got its start in 2017. Indians who had previously participated in Formula Student competitions felt the need for a similar engineering design competition to be held in India.

Cathy D’Souza was one of the founding members. “I was part of a Formula Student team at the University of Toronto from 2007 until 2010. I started helping out on the team as a business operations member and as an engine member, and then eventually led the team as manager in my final year,” she tells Swarajya.

“I joined the team because I was fascinated with how a group of young people could put an entire function ‘formula-style’ car together. As a mechanical engineering student, I wanted to be that person who could do what they did. I saw the impact this platform had on my growth as an individual,” says D’Souza, the former director and chief executive officer (CEO) of Curiosum Tech, the company behind Formula Bharat.

D’Souza and other Formula Student enthusiasts banded together to create an Indian variant that strictly adhered to the highest global standards. They wanted the domestic competition to be counted as among the best in the region and also gain an entry into the prestigious Formula Student World Rankings. They decided to run Formula Bharat along the lines of the Formula Student Germany competition, with some changes to reflect the geographic and demographic realities of India.

Underpinning this effort was the simple belief that Indian engineers were extremely talented but that there was no platform on home soil to test their knowledge.

The Going Was Tough

The idea of initiating a top-notch Indian Formula Student competition was born of noble motivation, ambitious vision, and sound reasoning. But the work wasn’t easy.

One of the biggest challenges the team faced was finding a venue that was affordable for a student competition. In addition to affordability, the venue needed to have the capacity to accommodate the dynamic events laid out in the international rule book.

An example of the latter is the skidpad track event, a typical feature of any Formula Student competition. The skidpad event is designed to evaluate a Formula Student car's ability to handle turns and maintain grip on a flat surface within a track shaped as the figure ‘8’. It requires a minimum paved area of 40 metres (m) x 20 m along with sufficient run-off space.

The organisers zeroed in on the Kari Motor Speedway in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. It was among the most affordable race tracks in India and also had the amenities necessary to hold the competition. Interestingly, the venue was initially without a skidpad track. But when the time came to resurface the track in the second year of the competition, track owner B Vijay Kumar worked with the organisers to build the skidpad track.

After Coimbatore was picked as the ‘home turf’ for the competition, a new challenge emerged. The organisers were based in Mumbai, and more than a third of the participating teams were from Maharashtra, and another third from North India. The South was thus new ground for the majority of the Formula Bharat community of the time, principally composed of the host organisation’s staff and a group of volunteer members.

The language barrier proved to be a stiff challenge to overcome. The phrase ‘lost in translation’ often took a literal turn. Students were particularly challenged because they had to organise transport for their members and the cars down south to Coimbatore, interacting frequently with various vendors and other stakeholders. But after multiple visits to Kovai, they learnt to communicate.

As for funding, Formula Bharat ran initially on competition registration fees, with monetary sponsorship coming in from Altair Hyperworks and Bosch in the first year of the event.

Close to a decade has since passed. The event concluded its ninth edition in January 2025.

The competition has been held successfully every year — the 2021 edition being virtual on account of the Covid-19 pandemic — at the Kari Motor Speedway, with its owner, Kumar, and the track managers enthusiastically championing the holding of the event annually at the Coimbatore venue.

The funding for the competition has expanded beyond the registration fees to include newer avenues like sponsorships (more than before), workshops, advertorials, and memberships. Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs), startups, and midsized businesses have come forward to support the initiative.

The host organisation and the community of volunteers have also grown in strength and among themselves are managing all aspects of the competition — from administration to technical operations — in increasingly resourceful ways. Over 20,000 students and 1,000 volunteers make up the Formula Bharat network today.

The engineering design event has developed its own alumni network, whose members work in leadership positions in companies like Ather Energy, Exponent Energy, Baaz Bikes, The Energy Company, Karkhana.io, Dozee, and Yotuh Energy.

And as its founding members had envisioned, the competition is the only one in South Asia to get listed on the Formula Student Global World Rankings.

The Formula Bharat Student Experience

Nandhu Saji is the captain of Yeti Racing at the School of Engineering, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kerala, and Rohit Sawant leads Team Kratos at the Pimpri Chichwad College of Engineering, Pune, Maharashtra.

These are two young individuals from two different states of India — pretty far apart too — whose paths had never crossed until earlier this year, when they faced off on the highly competitive stage of Formula Bharat.

And as they parted ways, they both left as winners — Yeti Racing won the January 2025 edition of Formula Bharat in the combustion vehicle (CV) category and Kratos in the electric vehicle (EV) category.

Nandhu was born in Alappuzha and raised in Kasargod, Kerala. Rohit was born and raised in Sangli, Maharashtra.

Nandhu had earned a diploma in mechanical engineering and worked for two years at the tyre manufacturing company MRF before joining the mechanical branch in the second year of engineering. Rohit had made his way from Sangli to the nearest big city, Pune, after finishing Class XII, to get an engineering degree.

Both Nandhu and Rohit had found a place in their respective colleges’ racing clubs.

Yeti Racing at the Kerala college was established in 2017 but was discontinued during the 2020 pandemic. In 2024, the club was dusted off back into action. “I had some experience in manufacturing, and I had some work experience, so they chose me for manufacturing,” Nandhu tells Swarajya. He was picked as the manufacturing lead.

Team Kratos of the Pune college, named after a Greek god, had a decorated history. “The team was established in 2014. Our first vehicle competed in 2015. We participated in SAE Supra in the combustion event. We were all-India ranked first three times, and 2019 was the season when the team shifted from combustion to electric and participated in Formula Bharat. In Formula Bharat, we are four times national champions. This is the legacy of the team,” the Sangli native tells Swarajya proudly.

Rohit joined the chassis and composites team along with batchmate Upendra Patil, the current vice captain of the team, with the latter also being inducted into the cost and manufacturing group and as a driver.

Teams building up to a Formula Bharat competition chart similar courses. First, they register and take a rules book quiz, which determines the standing of the team on the registered list or waitlist for the competition. Waitlisted teams get a chance to compete in case a team from the waitlist drops out or gets deregistered from the competition.

A college team selected for the competition typically begins to set up a team for the competition and assigns roles for each team member. They might pluck members from the existing racing club and also induct new entrants.

Students join based on their interests, as well as their performance in the execution of design tasks assigned to them and in interviews where their problem-solving skills are tested.

The larger team is then subdivided into various focus groups. In the case of Yeti Racing, every student was added to any one of these subsystem groups — brake, powertrain, roll cage, suspension. In addition, some members were added to groups that were meant to oversee non-technical functions like media and sponsorships and manufacturing procurement.

Nandhu found a spot in the roll cage group. The roll cage is the body of the car and integrates all the other subsystems.

After the teams are set up, the design stage begins. Students design their race cars using computer-aided design (CAD) software. “We all learnt CAD. It is in our syllabus. But in my case, before I learnt it in class, I had already learnt CAD for the competition. And by the time it came in class, I had become a master of CAD,” Nandhu says.

The selection of materials follows the design phase, after which comes the procurement of materials and parts. Only then comes the actual manufacturing and assembly work to bring the design to reality. After the car has been put together, it is tested repeatedly until its transportation to Coimbatore for the competition.

“We manufactured, assembled, and tested the vehicle and did some documentation related to the vehicle,” Rohit says about his and Upendra’s contribution to the team.

Testing the car is tricky because the related infrastructure is typically absent or minimal in most colleges. Both Yeti Racing and Team Kratos tested their cars within their respective college premises, with the latter even venturing out to test their car on a road after seeking permission.

The testing stage is also where the drivers selected for the competition get to flex their muscles, at least as much as their prototype vehicles allow. Both Yeti and Kratos had picked four drivers for the 2025 competition.

As the competition arrives, it’s time to head to Coimbatore. “I came with the car in the lorry,” Nandhu says, laughing. “The majority of my team members came by train two days before the competition. I arrived in the morning the day before the competition, when we were supposed to check in.”

Broadly speaking, the competition proceeds with this flow: a technical inspection to check whether the car has been designed and manufactured exactly as stated in the rule book, followed by the static and dynamic events.

“They check every point in the rule book for every car. If even a bolt is not proper, they will give us a re-TA (a repeat technical assessment). We then need to appear again (for the inspection) for our mistakes,” Nandhu says, revealing that his team took two attempts to get past the technical round. Since they had built the car themselves, they were able to make the fixes asked of them by the judges on the spot.

The technical inspection is followed by a series of tests. In the tilt test, the car is parked on a platform that is first tilted by 40 degrees and then by 60 degrees; the expectation is that the car must stay put. “They will check for any (fluid) leaks, and the car needs to remain flat on the platform. It should not fall over,” Nandhu says.

The back wheel of Nandhu’s team’s car rose up during the tilt test, and so they needed to come up with a solution quickly. They were smart about it. “We adjusted with tyre pressure. We decreased the tyre pressure, so it was acting as the suspension,” Nandhu explains.

After the tilt test is the egress test, wherein a driver must be able to procedurally and safely exit the vehicle within just five seconds. In the noise test, a 120-decibel limit is set for the cars competing in the event. Then, a brake test concludes the technical inspection stage.

The successful teams get to move on to the track events. “Only four teams qualified for the TI out of the 30 combustion teams that were participating in the competition,” Nandhu says about the 2025 edition.

The dynamic events comprise the acceleration, skidpad, autocross, endurance, and efficiency tests. In the endurance stage, drivers finally take centre stage. Two drivers cover 16 laps split between each other, with a swift pitstop breaking up the two driver runs. This round also carries the most points and is crucial to a team’s chances of winning.

In 2025, only two teams were able to move past the endurance stage in the combustion and electric categories of the competition. “At that time, we knew that, anyway, the second place was ours. The other team was driving the car as slow as possible because if we were simply completing the endurance stage, we would win the championship. But our drivers had come for a race. They didn’t bother about anything else. I think they lapped the other team three or four times,” Nandhu says with a smirk.

Yeti Racing won the overall championship in the combustion vehicle category, led by the captain-vice captain duo of Asif Ahammad H and Abhijith Mohan, while Team Kratos won in the electric vehicle category, led by Invesh Sonar and Ruturaj Patil. Yeti’s win was a first for any team from Kerala participating in Formula Bharat.

Nandhu, Rohit, and Upendra report coming away with many learnings and highlights from the 2025 competition.

“One of my favourite moments personally — I designed something using CAD, and I gave the model for CNC machining, and I got the part back in my hand. This was a memorable moment for me,” Nandhu says.

He was also relieved when the car was assembled exactly as planned. “As I was the manufacturing lead, I was nervous about this one thing: every part will be individually made, and one day, everything will be assembled. That will be my crucial day. If everything went to plan, all four tyres would be on the ground. When that day came, I panicked. Because if anything went wrong, it would be on my head. But that day, everything went well. That was one of my proudest moments,” Nandhu says.

Among the many skills he picked up was project management. “This is a very good skill for an engineer. Building a team, gathering teammates who all come together and execute a scheduled project on time — that is a big task!” he says, adding that they also “learnt about modern manufacturing methods, like 3D printing, laser cutting, and CNC cutting.”

Financial management was also a key takeaway. “Overall, we were dealing with about Rs 10 lakh of transactions. For building the car itself, it took Rs 5 lakh. We were raising and managing this huge amount. Students learnt how to get sponsorships and how to manage money,” Nandhu says, vowing to take greater interest in this area as the current team captain of Yeti Racing.

“In cost and manufacturing, you have to show how you have saved the cost by either reducing the material, changing the material, or changing the manufacturing process. So you learn about different manufacturing processes through this (submission), (and) you learn which one is costlier and which one is cheaper yet still does the same work. So you learn costing,” says Upendra of Team Kratos.

“For the business plan presentation event, we are virtually selling our car. How we will sell our car, how we will make a profit from our car — on that basis they rank us. So they are not only enabling us to make a car, go to the track, and win. (Through) the cost and manufacturing submission, the business plan presentation — they (the judges) are testing our presentation skills. So students are learning whatever the companies and corporates need currently. Whatever skills an engineer needs, they were testing that,” says Nandhu.

Formula Bharat has also emerged as a platform for innovation. Team Stier Racing from the Ramaiah Institute of Technology, for instance, has pioneered the use of 3D printing to manufacture large-scale carbon fibre moulds, including components such as nose cones and seats, at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional methods.

This innovation has facilitated the opening of a new business line for the sponsoring company that provided the printing, enabling them to attract industry clients who now regularly use this process for prototype mould production.

Additionally, the Ramaiah team is among the few, if not the only, competitors on the current grid to implement metal 3D-printed wheel hubs.

The Formula Bharat Advantage: Industry Perspective

“I am where I am today because of Formula Student,” says Parth Mehta, a senior quality systems engineer at Tesla. He works out of Tesla’s megafactory in Lathrop, California, where he is working on the Tesla Megapack — an industrial energy storage system.

When this Mumbaikar was in Class XI, he read a newspaper article about four colleges of engineering in Mumbai having built a race car and that they were headed to Germany for a competition. One of the colleges mentioned was K J Somaiya College of Engineering.

“They had some small pictures of the cars (in the article). And the one that stood out for me, I remember very clearly, was the one from K J Somaiya. They had this nice black-coloured car with orange highlights, and it was completely made of carbon fibre, which, as an engineering student preparing for engineering and who was into F1, was very fascinating,” he says.

This newspaper story influenced Parth’s choice of engineering college. He enrolled in the mechanical engineering programme at K J Somaiya, hoping to quickly hop on to Orion Racing, the Formula student team on campus. And hop he did. By the end of the first year of engineering, Parth was on the team. The spirits were high as the team was fresh off a win just earlier that year, in 2015.

Parth went on to participate in Formula Bharat competitions from 2016 through 2018. He won as a team member in 2016 and as a captain in 2018. “I won two competitions while I was there, but I also didn’t do well in one of the competitions. It teaches you how to handle success and failure at a very early age,” he says.

He was the skipper for a team of 70 students, all from various engineering domains — electrical, electronics, computer science — an experience that even professionals seldom get years into their careers. “What I learnt was how do you work with 19-year-old, 20-year-old kids with so much energy — I was just about a year older than them; I was 22 — and how you bind them with one single objective. No engineering textbook is going to teach you this. Not even an online course,” he says.

Thanks to Formula Bharat, Parth landed a job right out of college. He had reached out to a Formula Bharat organiser who worked at Ather Energy, the electric scooter manufacturer, in search of a job opportunity.

During the interview, he and the interviewer bonded over the competition, and the interviewer felt confident about hiring Parth. “So he said, ‘Oh, I remember you. I don't need to ask you anything about yourself. Do you have any questions for me?’ And that one-hour interview slot became just 10 minutes long,” he says.

After one and a half years at Ather, Parth enrolled in a master’s programme in Germany. “I think I landed in Germany on the 27th of October, and on the 2nd of November, I joined the Formula Student team at the Technical University of Berlin,” he says.

About a year and a half later, he was once again hired by a company on the back of his Formula Student experience. This company was Tesla. He was picked initially for an internship and later a permanent position with the leading electric vehicle manufacturer.

Coimbatore native Pavilan P also got his start with Formula Bharat, both during his engineering education and later as he kicked off his professional career. Pavilan is a program associate at Exponent Energy, an Indian energy startup that's unlocked a 15-minute full charge for EVs — on any vehicle format and using a lithium-ion cell.

“At Exponent, I play a crucial role in connecting engineering, manufacturing, and operations. My experiences with Formula Bharat have significantly shaped my ability to effectively bridge these different areas,” he tells Swarajya.

Pavilan studied mechanical engineering at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in Coimbatore. There, he readily took a liking to Formula Bharat. It was 2022, and the pandemic was just easing up. “I volunteered to assist with the event, which meant diving headfirst into a variety of tasks. I was involved in speaking with vendors, negotiating deals, coordinating activities, and handling last-minute requirements. I also assisted with technical inspections, the tilt table, and the fuelling process,” he says.

The next year, Pavilan moved to a guiding role, mentoring a friend for five months before and during the event, while also serving as the captain and powertrain engineer of his college’s Formula Student team, Amrita Racing, as well as leading the fabrication of their vehicle.

He then joined Exponent, which has been a sponsor of Formula Bharat. These past couple of years, Pavilan has deepened his involvement with Formula Bharat by partnering with the event organising team.

Just like Nandhu, Rohit, and Upendra, Parth and Pavilan benefited significantly from the Formula Bharat experience, before and after they had entered industry.

“At the ages of 19, 20, 21, you learn to be a part of a team,” says Parth. “You do not learn this until you reach an organisation, and to be honest, standard legacy organisations just break you down. They put you into these silos, and you just put your head down and work.”

But not in Formula Bharat. “Here, you learn to work towards something that is a bigger objective. That is winning the competition or building a certain car with whatever specifications. So you learn how to work towards a goal,” Parth says, adding that you also learn to do that within a timeline. “You are building a new car every single year. Every single team has 365 days to build a new car. One year to build and test a car is extremely difficult.”

By building a car from scratch, students learn faster than in traditional classrooms, gaining technical expertise alongside teamwork, project management, and financial planning.

Besides, says Parth, “This entire cycle of product development is not taught in any engineering book.”

For Pavilan, Formula Bharat ignited his interest in cutting-edge fields and provided him with the practical, hands-on experience that textbooks cannot replicate.

Echoing this point, Parth explains, “I can do a copper radiator, an aluminium radiator, and why do I do aluminium instead of copper? We all know copper is a better heat exchanger than aluminium, but every single vehicle in this world has an aluminium heat exchanger, radiator. Why does that happen? You learn these things working with just one component.”

While working in Formula Bharat, Pavilan and his team had to overcome challenges with communication and planning, which ultimately taught him a great deal about risk management and timelines.

“One example was when we were trying to use a 3D-printed intake plenum. We ran into some problems, and that pushed me to learn more about 3D printing and find a better solution. Those kinds of hands-on experiences and learning to work within budgets have been really helpful in my current role at Exponent Energy,” Pavilan says.

According to Parth, while design and manufacturing are taught in engineering colleges, how to design for manufacturability is not. He learnt that in Formula Student competitions. “You can make the world’s best design, but if you can’t manufacture it and put it in the car and sell it, you can’t make sense with the best design in the world,” he says.

“Looking back, my Formula Bharat experience has been a big help in my career,” Pavilan says. “It gave me a chance to learn from mistakes early on, which meant I needed less on-the-job training. I even keep a ‘mistake sheet’ as a reminder, which helps me avoid repeating the same errors.”

“If I could offer one piece of advice to current engineering students,” says the Exponent engineer, “it would be this: the end result isn’t everything. The process and the path you take to achieve that result are truly what create the best memories. Work smart, but also remember to celebrate the journey with your team.”

The organisers of the competition have seen the passion of the students up close and seen the industry reciprocating as well. “Having organised competitions across two continents in the last 14 years, I have seen the passion emulated by students on the platform,” says Cathy. “In India, we have seen growing interest from the industry to hire directly from our platform, which adds to the motivation of students participating in this challenging event. We would still like to see more industry participation, and we hope that day is not too far.”

At a time when India's graduate employability figures don't make for great reading, Formula Bharat is quietly fostering employability in India, ensuring that participants have a direct pathway into the industry.

Advancing this effort further, the organising team has an exciting new initiative in the works — an exclusive platform designed to connect engineers with companies looking to hire top talent. It will be like a LinkedIn but tailored specifically for engineers.

The company aims to roll it out later this year, creating new opportunities for both recruiters and aspiring engineers.

That aside, Formula Bharat remains committed to providing a well-rounded, practical engineering education. "Formula Bharat is helping make true engineers that are of use to the industry," says Parth. "The education that you get, the degree that you get, not just has paper value, but has applicable value, not just knowledge value as well, but applied knowledge value. That's the impact of Formula Student on education in general."