W ay back in late 1950s, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) had commissioned a spin-off project in which highly qualified engineers with state of the art  technologies, had worked after-office hours and on weekends to develop a low cost "people's car" which was showcased to public in 1960s. It was affordable, had excellent fuel efficency, and was built like a tank. All they wanted was just an approval from Nehru Govt to start mass-production. Unfortunately, Nehru felt such an affordable car project was a "luxury", and thus the project was shelved. More than a decade later, when Indira Gandhi Govt decided to start a grand project of affordable people's car, they could have simply gone ahead with HAL's car model. Also, by then, many other reputed Indian firms including Tata & Mahindra had also showcased low cost prototypes. In fact, there was a call for tender in which 20+ highly respected companies including HAL, HMT, Tata, Mahindra and many others, had applied for the project. But not surprisingly, the Congress Govt chose to ignore all of them (bypassed all applications) and awarded the project to Sanjay Gandhi. There were huge protests, citing nepotism and political favoritism, but the govt curbed all such voices through threats and arrests. In 1975, after lot of corruption and dilly-dallying, Sanjay finally showcased his prototype car which turned out to be a huge flop. As we can see from the photographs, it was a mockery of engineering. It was clunky, couldn't run for more than 10 mins due to over-heating and host of other issues. By then, emergency was already imposed, and to avoid public ridicule of the flop car, Sanjay silently discarded the project, to jump full time into politics. It took another 10 years for India to finally get a decent affordable car with the help of a foreign partner. And that's how, due to nepotism, India had to wait for almost 3 decades, till 1980s, to get an affordable car, despite having all the technology (including marvellous prototype) for it way back in 1950s itself.(Guru Prasad)