P Subramanian

P. Subramanian was the founder of Shanthi Gears, a Coimbatore gear maker known around the world, and was fondly called the “Gear Man of Coimbatore”. He was named for the Padma Shri posthumously in 2021 in the field of trade and industry, from Tamil Nadu ^[1].

A shed and no capital

Subramanian was born on 11 November 1942 into a farming family, and was the first in his family to go into industry ^[2]. At PSG Polytechnic in Coimbatore he earned a mechanical engineering diploma (1963) and a further qualification in production engineering (1966), and then taught there ^[2]. In 1968 he began making gears in a small rented shed with no capital, and in 1969 set up Shanthi Engineering and Trading Company ^[2].

Building Shanthi Gears

In the early days he designed and built a gear hobbing machine himself ^[2]. The company was incorporated in 1972, first making gears for textile machinery, then gearboxes from 1980–81 ^[2]. It became a public limited company listed on the stock exchanges in 1986, and its customers came to include aerospace, steel, defence, wind power, railways, cement and sugar ^[2]. He shunned publicity throughout ^[2].

Giving back

Having grown up poor, from the early 1980s he paid for the schooling of poor children in government schools, built classrooms and gave scholarships, and from 1987 built and widened village roads and bridges ^[2]. In 1996 he founded Shanthi Social Services, a charitable trust named after his wife, Shanthi, to provide education, rural development, medical care and food to people in need ^[2]. In 2012, at 70, he left the company to devote himself to the trust ^[2].