suparjya swain 
FEATURE: Long before he was shipping virtual reality-powered smart factories to India’s top engineering institutions, Mr. Prakash A. Sulakhe was a barefoot boy wandering the dusty bylanes of Maharashtra with a wobbling toolbox in one hand and a saffron flag in the other. At thirteen, he could lead a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) drill at dawn, re-solder a blown radio by noon, and convince an entire village to open a new shakha by dusk. That early blend of discipline, service, and inventive grit has never left him. Today, in a sun-drenched Pune plant filled with buzzing CNC trainer lathes and augmented reality-enabled mechatronics rigs, the same boy—now a fifty-year-old entrepreneur—is quietly dismantling the expensive foreign monopoly over India’s technical education equipment.
His twin ventures, CADMECH Engineering and Sinewave Engineering, have grown into two of India’s top suppliers of Industry 4.0 laboratory setups. From polytechnics in remote Vidarbha to classified R&D bays of the DRDO, Mr. Sulakhe’s machines are now redefining how India learns to build. But this is no textbook startup fairy tale or hand-me-down family empire. Mr. Sulakhe’s story is a high-voltage fusion of grassroots innovation, RSS-forged leadership, and boardroom daring. He reverse engineers expensive imported systems, repackages them with indigenous software, and slashes prices so radically that even financially struggling institutions can dream of running a smart factory. “Technology should liberate, not intimidate,” he insists—summarising a life devoted to transforming scrap metal and stubborn dreams into India’s most disruptive classroom machines.
Born on July 11, 1974, into a modest household—his father a government employee and his mother a homemaker—Mr. Sulakhe was raised on two quiet but powerful beliefs: that education was the ladder out of limitations, and that discipline was the spine of self-reliance. The RSS morning shakhas instilled a deep sense of frugal innovation; those bamboo lathis weren’t just for drills—they doubled up as measuring tools in school science projects. Evenings were for radio repairs and soldering scraps into working gadgets. Even before completing his diploma in Industrial Electronics from P.L. Government Polytechnic in Latur in 1993, he had already begun his hands-on journey—working in a sugar factory, cleaning motor filters across double shifts, absorbing the rhythms of machinery with the curiosity of a born engineer.
Mr. Sulakhe’s first professional foray began on the factory floor at Synergetic, a German-collaborated SPM (Special Purpose Machines) company. The work was gritty—electronic assembly, testing, and PLC ladder coding—but invaluable. “Those three years taught me the smell of flux and the sound of a stepper motor that’s out of sync,” he says with a laugh. By 1996, he was flying across India, leading machine integration projects and gaining a reputation for translating complex engineering jargon into simple Marathi or Hindi for shop floor workers. But he sensed that the industry was changing too fast for traditional technical roles to keep up. Determined to broaden his understanding, he pursued two postgraduate diplomas, an M.Phil., and eventually a Ph.D. in Management. Each academic step, he says, “added a new set of lenses—finance, human behavior, policy risk—through which to view a circuit diagram.”
The entrepreneurial leap came in 2001 with the co-founding of V Ramp Systems. At a time when India was witnessing a boom in private engineering colleges, Mr. Sulakhe’s company offered locally designed training rigs as cost-effective alternatives to overpriced imported ones. Instead of reselling foreign trainers, they reverse-engineered them, added PC-based controls, and offered them at half the price. The orders poured in, but challenges followed. Colleges lacked technical support, and faculties often panicked at the first malfunction. Mr. Sulakhe’s solution was vertical integration. In 2007, he teamed up with BJ Engineering to form Sinewave Engineering Pvt. Ltd., where everything—from shafts to firmware—was built under one roof. Their mantra: “One roof, one responsibility, zero excuses.”
But the real turning point came with the founding of CADMECH Engineering Pvt. Ltd., a spin-off that bridged education and defense R&D. CADMECH introduced CNC trainer lathes, AR/VR-enabled mechatronics benches, and indigenous CIM/FMS cells that finally presented India with credible, homegrown alternatives to imported lab infrastructure. Today, Mr. Sulakhe dons many hats—Director of Sinewave, Director of CADMECH, Partner in Tek Sure Mechatronix, and official distributor in India for U.S.-based innovators like Pocket NC and WAZER. He has authored nine research papers, covering everything from low-cost automation to simulation-based learning pedagogy.
His contributions to the industry have also earned national recognition. In a grand felicitation event attended by dignitaries including the Chief Minister of Goa, Mr. Pramod Sawant; Member of Parliament Hema Malini; and Union Cabinet Minister Shripad Naik, Mr. Sulakhe was honoured with the “First Great Businessman Award” for his outstanding impact in indigenous engineering innovation. The event also marked a personal milestone—the official launch of his first book, unveiled by Mr. Sawant and Ms. Hema Malini, highlighting his journey from grassroots engineering to national entrepreneurship.
His leadership and innovation were further celebrated at the 25th Asian Business & Social Forum, held on 16th April 2025 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, where he was conferred with the prestigious title of India’s Greatest Brands & Leaders 2024–25. These recognitions reflect not just business success, but a deeper national relevance—his work is seen as enabling self-reliance in technical education and engineering training.
With his second book on the horizon, Mr. Sulakhe continues to inspire young engineers and entrepreneurs—not just with machines and training systems, but with ideas, stories, and lived experience that bridge India’s industrial past with its high-tech future.
His group now ranks among India’s top two providers of advanced technical lab setups, serving over 200 institutes and DRDO facilities across the country.
Home is in Pune’s Dhayari suburb, where his wife, Ulka Beedkar Sulakhe, an M.Sc. and M.Ed., runs a coaching academy that teaches schoolchildren science in their native language. Their two sons—one studying Mechanical Engineering, the other Robotics & Automation—often serve as beta testers for their father’s latest simulators. The Sangh volunteer within him still guides his entrepreneurial vision, especially during moments when strategy veers off course from national purpose. Above his desk are handwritten goals that read like a shakha pledge: to benchmark Indian lab standards globally; to deepen technical competence while keeping costs low; to generate employment and nurture employee welfare schemes; and to pursue sustainability—not just in materials and energy, but in social impact too.
That final principle is already evident. CADMECH’s Industry 4.0 demonstrator labs now run on energy-efficient drives and include remote diagnostics—cutting both carbon emissions and unnecessary travel. At fifty, Mr. Prakash Sulakhe stands at the crossroads of three Indias: rural self-help, industrial hustle, and digital-first education. He can quote SWOT matrices with the same ease as an RSS prarthana, seeing no contradiction in either. “Strategy,” he says with a smile, “is just the shakha discipline applied to commerce.”
From a bicycle-borne volunteer to the architect of India’s most advanced smart laboratories, Mr. Sulakhe’s journey embodies the spirit stitched into every CADMECH trainer: learn by doing, lead by serving. As India sprints toward becoming a $5 trillion, knowledge-powered economy, this quiet engineer from Beed is making sure its classrooms—and its students—are equipped to build the future, one low-cost, high-tech machine at a time.
