Engineering Excellence

Ajit Prabhu’s engineering services firm helps industry stalwarts like Airbus, General Electric and BMW shore up their R&D

- Anshul Dhamija

It had been a little over two years since Ajit Prabhu moved to the US for higher studies, when, in 1994, his parents decided to visit him. Prabhu was then pursuing a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, after earning a master’s in mechanical engineering from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

“I was on a stipend of about $800 a month. It was hard to sustain oneself, let alone bring one’s parents to the US,” recalls Prabhu, now 48. When their visit ended after two months, he ran up a credit card bill of $5,000 that included the cost of air tickets, insurance and other expenses. To clear his bills, he took up a contract engineer’s job at General Electric’s (GE) corporate R&D centre in Schenectady, New York. “I had no intention of doing the job as I wanted to pursue a doctorate degree. But I had to pay off my debts and, at a salary of $52,000 a year, I was blown away by the money,” he says. Having grown up in a 300 sq ft home in Karnataka’s Hubli, where his father worked as a lawyer, “I had never seen that kind of money before,” adds Prabhu.

The move turned out to be fortuitous in more ways. The GE job gave Prabhu, a self-confessed engineering geek, a peek into the behemoth’s technical know-how. “A lot of technical problems regarding their businesses were being solved at the centre and the more I got to know about them, the more fascinated I got,” says Prabhu.