Cementing the“Make in India” Dream

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Startup India initiative on India’s 69th Independence Day with an aspiration to impart more strength and inspiration to the talented young generation of India to do something new for India and humanity. With a vision to create a platform where budding entrepreneurs could establish themselves without any hassles, the initiative was set up to provide funding support and incentives in areas such as patent filing and simplification of the startup process. Five months in, in January 2016, the Startup India Action Plan was launched. For a country that boasts of having the third- largest startup ecosystem in the world, this initiative provides a further boost to nurture innovation.

The startup movement has traversed a long distance since then. From being restricted to the digital/technology sector to growing into a wider range of sectors covering agriculture, manufacturing, education and healthcare; from being confined to Tier 1 cities to reaching Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities – Indian startups are spreading their wings far and wide. The initiative has managed to instil confidence in the youth, that that their idea is more than just an idea and that there are opportunities to help nurture it further. No wonder, today India is maturing as a startup hub.

Against this backdrop Ajay Enterprises is scripting a new history in the field of grouting engineering. The company deals in injection grouting, epoxy grouting and other allied fields. Injection grouting is a process of filling the cracks, voids or honeycombs under pressure in concrete or masonry structural members for repairing of cracks, strengthening of damaged concrete or masonry structural members. Unlike cement grout which is made from a cementitious powder mix, epoxy grout is made from epoxy resins and a filler powder. Epoxy grouting is extremely durable and almost completely stain-proof.

When Uday India asked Ajay Kumar, CEO of Ajay Enterprises, how he came in the field of grouting engineering, he said that he was doing all work manually (injection grouting, epoxy grouting and poly grouting) in the starting day of his work and due to that he was facing problems of low productivity, high cost, waste of material, poor performance and high risk of losing user-satisfaction. Hence, to increase performance, he searched machines in the market and found “cemented injection grouting machine” and “epoxy injection grouting machine”. But, according to him, these machines had many drawbacks such as high cost maintenance; cleaning tank was a tough work because it did not clean automatically; pipe and piston were blocked by material due to that there was a threat of blast in piston and pipe. He further stated that earlier he had to carry two machines to complete all the work, whereas now he has to carry only one machine. Earlier, the machines were of very poor quality in performance, productivity and life. Pipe and used material in machines were of very low quality, due to which it got damaged very fast and thus it was not cost effective.

Elaborating on how he got into developing those machines, Ajay Kumar said that he wasted a lot of time to prepare machines and arrange the damaged parts of the machines, and due to all these problems, he was not able to complete his commitment given to clients. Then he decided to develop a machine that fulfilled all his requirement and he started gathering information. After a long search and research, he decided to develop a machine that worked for all grouting purposes (injection grouting, cemented grouting and epoxy grouting). Thereafter, he started to prepare sketches of machines in 2013 and completed in six month and then he went ahead to develop prototypes. It took him one year to prepare those prototypes. “I was very happy and excited when all functions started to work properly,” said ajay kumar.

Ajay Kumar further elaborated that he started to test those machines from May 2014 in all conditions, i.e, injection grouting, cemented grouting and epoxy grouting, and modified the machines correcting functional defect and parts of the machines. Then he decided to launch those machines in the market after five years of testing in all scenarios–by himself and by other engineering companies. He received a huge positive response from the market, as contractors and engineering companies took the products hand to hand. Thereafter, Ajay Enterprises never looked back, scaling new heights. 

By Uday India Bureau