The 10th-Grade Dropout Who Now Supplies Rolls-Royce and Boeing

Rakesh Chopdar failed his 10th-grade board exams. Today, his company builds turbine parts for Rolls-Royce and Boeing.

The distance between those two facts started in his father's nut-and-bolt workshop in Hyderabad.

After the exam failure, family and friends called him a failure outright. At 16, he chose the shop floor over another attempt at school, teaching himself mechanical engineering by doing the work rather than studying it. The real break came when a customer walked in with a complex aerofoil component, frustrated that no Indian manufacturer could make it well and cheap at the same time. Chopdar reverse-engineered the part himself and got it right.

That single win became Azad Engineering in 2008. One CNC machine, a 200-square-meter shed, and a focus on power generation and clean energy components built mostly for export. He put every rupee of profit back into the business until it grew into a facility running more than 200 machines.

The next stretch is the part that's hard to believe. Azad started manufacturing mission- and life-critical rotating components for gas turbines, aircraft engines, and defense platforms, and it did it well enough to land long-term contracts with Rolls-Royce, Baker Hughes, GE Vernova, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. A partnership with India's DRDO followed, building hybrid turbo-gas generator engines under the Make in India push.

By the time Azad went public in December 2023, Sachin Tendulkar's early investment in the company had already turned into one of the more talked-about IPO stories of the year.

A boy once told he'd failed now runs a Tier 1 supplier to some of the world's most demanding industries.