The Maruti Story

India comes home in a Maruti

'At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock,' by David Ogilvy in 1950's was perhaps the best known headline ever written for an automobile ad. Thankfully, during that time, India's leading automobile producers did not hire David for an ad campaign, since Indian made cars were in a sellers' market domestically, with a long waiting line. Had David really driven any of the Indian cars, he would have created an even more exciting campaign to describe them: "In our cars, all parts, except the horn, make noise".

This was in short, the true status of India's Automobile Industry till the arrival of Maruti Suzuki in 1983. It would be an understatement to say that Maruti Suzuki transformed the industry. In fact it reinvented and revolutionized it.

Most of India's economic failures in the previous century is attributed to the industrial licencing policy that emanated from the philosophy of central planning and governmental... read more