Engineering India's Way Past the Traffic Jam

Bengaluru, 4th August 2026: In a city where an ambulance can take longer to reach a hospital than the patient can afford, Rakesh Gaonkar has a proposition: send help by air instead of road. As Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sarla Aviation, he laid out this vision during a keynote address at Realize LIVE Asia-Pacific 2026, where Dr. Vasudha Hegde, Professor and Head, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at JAIN (Deemed-to-be University), was among those in attendance.

Gaonkar's talk centred on India's efforts to build its own electric air mobility systems, technology designed to cut emergency response times and work around the urban traffic congestion that slows conventional transport. He spoke about the engineering choices behind these aircraft and how each one brings the technology closer to being deployed where it is needed most, getting patients to care faster.

What came through in the keynote was less about the machines themselves and more about what they represent. Gaonkar made a case for building solutions in India, for India's specific problems, rather than adapting technology designed elsewhere. He framed indigenous engineering as a way for the country's innovators to set benchmarks rather than follow them, and to do so while inspiring the next generation to think beyond imported solutions.

For Dr. Hegde, the session offered more than a glimpse of what electric aviation could achieve. It reflected why interactions like these matter to institutions such as JAIN, where faculty regularly engage with industry leaders to bring current thinking on innovation back into classrooms and research. Sessions like this one give students a clearer sense of what solving real problems with home-built technology actually requires, and what it can look like when it works.