The fresher who helped build Su-Kam’s 3-phase power — Vikas Garg and the technology India hadn’t made before

Su-Kam was the first Indian company to develop 3-phase inverter technology in India. This is the story of one of the engineers who helped make it happen — and why he came back to do it.

1 The fresher a friend sent to me

Vikas Garg came to us the way so many of my best engineers did — through someone I trusted. A friend of mine recommended him: a boy fresh out of his electronics degree, sharp and focused. We took him in as a fresher in our R&D team, and he started exactly where talent should start — on the firmware for our inverters, UPS systems and automation, as Assistant Manager – R&D.

What struck me about Vikas was how fast he learned. You could hand him a hard problem and watch him close the gap in weeks, not months. At Su-Kam that mattered more than a degree from anywhere, because our whole company ran on one mantra: innovate, or be ordinary. He worked across project after project, and he kept getting better.

2 Why the multinationals kept coming for my people

There was a pattern at Su-Kam that I came to see as both a compliment and a cost. The multinationals were always ready to take the people we trained. We were a school of power electronics that the big global names recruited from — and in 2007, one of them, Delta Energy Systems, took Vikas. He went on to head their firmware, software and display-solutions group in India and lead the design of video-wall controllers.

I never resented it. When a multinational hires your engineer, it is the market telling you that what you built inside your company is world-class. But I also knew the truth that the salary slips never captured: a big global company can give you scale and a brand, but it cannot always give you the freedom to invent.

3 He came back — for the culture, not the cheque

After a few years, Vikas came back to us. The reason he gave me has stayed with me: he was missing the culture and the innovation. That was our mantra, and it turned out to be the thing he couldn’t find anywhere else. He rejoined as Senior Engineering Manager and architected the firmware and software for our online UPS, inverters, solar inverters and PCUs across the entire range — from a small 100 VA all the way up to 100 kVA machines.

3Φ The technology an Indian company built first

Here is the part I am most proud of. Su-Kam was the first Indian company to develop 3-phase inverter technology in India. Not a multinational with a foreign parent — an Indian company, with Indian engineers, solving an Indian problem. We went on to build India’s first 3-phase Solar PCU back in 2006 — roughly six years before national policy even began to require it. And under my leadership, Su-Kam filed and won technology patents on this work.

Three-phase is not just “a bigger inverter.” It is a different discipline — balancing three live phases, holding a clean pure-sine output across all of them, and managing solar, battery and grid at high power without flinching. Vikas is to be credited for our 3-phase inverter and 3-phase Solar PCU technology, working alongside our R&D head Sanjeev Saini and the rest of a team that genuinely believed an Indian company could out-engineer anyone.

4 The machine in the video — Colossal 3P 80 KVA

The video above is the proof in steel. The Colossal 3P 80 KVA / 360V Solar PCU Inverter is the flagship of that three-phase work — an 80 KVA, three-phase, floor-standing machine that runs the load and charges a 360V battery bank (thirty 12V/150Ah batteries in series) at the same time, taking power from solar, battery and the grid and deciding intelligently which to use. It is the kind of load that used to belong only to a diesel generator — enough to run eleven CNC machines, or eight three-phase mini boilers, or a full petrol pump. We made it run on the sun. You can watch the original introduction video on YouTube here.

5 From fresher to patentee

Today Vikas Garg describes himself as an R&D Leader, a patentee and an innovator — and he has earned all three words. His granted patent, IN 274370, an Automatic Failure Detection System for a single-phase Inverter / UPS issued in 2016, came straight out of this world of work. That is the journey I always wanted Su-Kam to make possible: a young engineer a friend once recommended, walking in as a fresher and walking out with his name on a patent and a three-phase technology India had never built before.

People remember Su-Kam for the products. I remember it for the people — the ones who left, the ones who came back, and the culture that made coming back worth it. This one is for Vikas. — Kunwer Sachdev