Chitkara University and BAJA SAEINDIA Strengthen Future Mobility Collaboration in 2026

Chitkara University co-hosted a strategic meeting with the BAJA SAEINDIA Organising Committee in Chandigarh, bringing together two sides that have quietly worked alongside each other for years.

Chitkara University's leadership was represented by Dr. Madhu Chitkara, President and Co-founder, Dr. Sandhir Sharma, Vice Chancellor, and Dr. Rakesh Sharma, Registrar, who met with the BAJA SAEINDIA Organising Committee. Representing the committee were Mr. Balraj Subramaniam, Chairman of the Organising Committee, Mr. Jatin Garg, its Honorary Secretary, Dr. K. C. Vora, Senior Advisor to the Committee, and Mr. Balraj Bhanot, a widely respected automotive homologation expert and former Director at ARAI.

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Mr. Subramaniam opened the proceedings by speaking about BAJA SAEINDIA's legacy in nurturing engineering talent through hands-on learning and innovation. Responding to his remarks, Dr. Sandhir Sharma, Vice Chancellor, Chitkara University, highlighted how essential strong academia-industry partnerships have become in preparing students for the technological challenges emerging across the mobility sector.

Addressing the gathering, Dr. Madhu Chitkara, President and Co-founder, Chitkara University, spoke about the university's continued association with BAJA SAEINDIA and emphasised the transformative role experiential learning plays in engineering education. Such initiatives, she noted, inspire students to translate classroom learning into practical innovation while simultaneously strengthening their technical expertise, teamwork, leadership and problem-solving abilities. Her remarks reflected a broader theme that ran throughout the interaction: that engineering skills are best developed not only through instruction, but through the process of building something, testing it, and learning from where it falls short.

The discussion naturally turned to the journey and evolution of BAJA SAEINDIA, tracing how the competition has grown into one of India's most respected experiential learning platforms. Today, it functions as an umbrella spanning Electric Vehicle BAJA, Mechanical BAJA, Autonomous BAJA, and Hydrogen BAJA. Each of these four arms reflects a distinct engineering discipline in its own right. Electric Vehicle BAJA calls for an understanding of battery systems and power electronics, Autonomous BAJA brings in sensor technology and decision-making logic, Hydrogen BAJA introduces fuel-cell engineering and safety protocols, while Mechanical BAJA continues to test the fundamentals of traditional vehicle design. Together, this range gives participating students the opportunity to explore diverse future mobility technologies through hands-on, competitive engineering challenges rather than encountering them only as chapters in a textbook.

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The conversation also covered the Virtual Round of BAJA SAEINDIA, where digital engineering tools and simulation-based assessments evaluate vehicle design, engineering analysis, and innovation before teams advance to the competition's later stages. This phase allows teams to test and refine their engineering choices digitally before committing time and resources to physical fabrication, and it has become an increasingly important part of how the competition assesses innovation and design thinking early in the process. For universities that emphasise rigorous, industry-aligned learning, this newer layer of the competition fits naturally into the kind of preparation students benefit from well before they graduate. It rewards teams that get the fundamentals right early, rather than teams that simply look impressive once a vehicle is finally built.

The scale of what students actually take on within this framework is considerable. Participants conceptualise, design, analyse, fabricate and validate single-seater, all-terrain vehicles strictly in line with the BAJA SAEINDIA Rulebook before their work is tested in rigorous static and dynamic evaluations that assess engineering excellence, innovation, safety and endurance. The static evaluations examine the reasoning behind each design decision, while the dynamic evaluations put the finished vehicle through actual driving conditions on rough terrain, leaving little room for a design that looks strong on paper but performs poorly in practice. It is precisely this kind of demanding, real-world framework that has made BAJA SAEINDIA a meaningful reference point for institutions like Chitkara University that emphasise industry-aligned learning.

Beyond the competition itself, the interaction gave both sides a useful, direct exchange on how industry needs are shifting, whether in electric drivetrains, autonomous systems or hydrogen-based mobility, and how engineering education can keep pace with those shifts rather than trail behind them. Mr. Bhanot's presence added a particular kind of perspective to this exchange, given his years of experience at ARAI evaluating and certifying vehicles for real-world use. His involvement underlined a point that came up repeatedly through the meeting: that competitions like BAJA SAEINDIA work best when they are shaped not only by academic institutions and organising committees, but by people who have spent their careers judging whether vehicles actually meet the standards the industry requires.

By the end of the meeting, one thing was evident. BAJA SAEINDIA brought a well-established legacy and an evolving four-category competition structure to the table, while Chitkara University brought a matching commitment to experiential learning that has shaped its engineering programmes for years. Together, the two sides used the conversation to think through how that shared groundwork can be carried forward for the next generation of engineering students. It is a partnership built on common ground, one where both sides have clearly chosen to keep building it further.
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