Deep inside a jet engine, turbine blades spin in gas hotter than the metal’s own melting point, kept alive by cooling channels measured in microns. Machining one such blade — perfectly, thousands of times over — is among the hardest manufacturing jobs on Earth. In Hyderabad, Azad Engineering does exactly that, for Rolls-Royce, GE, Boeing, Airbus and India’s DRDO.
The company’s founder, Rakesh Chopdar, left school after the 10th standard and started working the shop floor of his father’s nuts-and-bolts workshop at 16. With no engineering degree and no funding cushion, he learned precision the hard way — by making thousands of small parts correctly, one at a time. In his mid-twenties, a customer walked in with an aerofoil — the curved, aerodynamically exact blade used inside turbines — and a problem: almost no Indian supplier could machine it to the punishing tolerances required at a viable cost. Chopdar asked for a few months to prove himself, and delivered. That breakthrough order, aerofoils for a European thermal-power turbine maker, became the foundation of AZAD Engineering, formally established in 2008 in a 200-square-metre shed in Balanagar, Hyderabad, with a single second-hand CNC machine.
What began with power-turbine aerofoils grew into one of manufacturing’s most unforgiving arenas: rotating and stationary components for gas, steam and aero engines, where the tolerance for error is effectively zero. Today the company’s client list reads like a who’s-who of global industry — GE Aviation, GE Vernova, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Siemens Energy, Honeywell Aerospace, Eaton, Baker Hughes, Boeing, Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney — alongside HAL, BHEL and DRDO. In January 2024, Rolls-Royce named Azad a strategic partner for manufacturing critical, complex components for defence aircraft engines, and the company went public in December 2023 with a Rs 740-crore IPO.
The defence milestones keep coming. On July 22, 2026, Azad Engineering manufactured and delivered to DRDO’s Gas Turbine Research Establishment the first indigenous expendable turbojet engine in the 350 kg thrust class — a jet engine designed by GTRE and realised end-to-end by Azad’s Hyderabad teams. The Ministry of Defence called the delivery a historic milestone for India’s aerospace and defence ecosystem: jet-engine technology is mastered by only a handful of nations, and this engine is meant to power a new generation of cruise missiles, jet-powered loitering munitions and tactical UAVs.
The commercial engine business is scaling just as fast. In September 2026, the company inaugurated two exclusive lean-manufacturing facilities for GE Vernova’s Gas Power business at its Centre of Excellence and Innovation Centre in Tunikibollaram, Hyderabad — 7,600 square metres each, dedicated to highly engineered rotating and stationary airfoils and specialised machined parts. That takes Azad to three dedicated facilities for GE Vernova and six customer-dedicated facilities since listing, inside a Phase-1 expansion of nearly 95,000 square metres.
From a shed with a second-hand CNC machine to machining the parts the world trusts inside its most demanding engines — Azad Engineering’s story is a reminder that world-class precision is not a credential, it is a habit: make it perfectly, a hundred times in a row, until the toughest customers on the planet hand you the parts they cannot afford to get wrong.
