Neha did not have a clear goal when she started. She had a family that pointed her in a direction and a mind that refused to stop once it got moving. From ITI to an MTech thesis with the support of Cummins India, from teaching mechanical engineering through a pandemic lockdown to managing vendors as the only woman on a shop floor, to designing hydraulic cylinders for a global company and collaborating daily with engineers in France and Germany: Neha Karande’s career is not a straight line. It is something more interesting than that.
HPS International is a French-founded global manufacturer of hydraulic cylinders, present in 28 countries with 17 subsidiaries, 11 partners, and 6 manufacturing plants worldwide. Its cylinders are precision-engineered to demanding industrial standards, with bore sizes up to 1,000 mm and stroke lengths up to 10,000 mm. HPS products serve industries including mould and die manufacturing, machine building, civil engineering, power plants, and oil and gas. The company opened its India manufacturing facility in Khed, Pune in 2025, strengthening local production capacity under General Manager Gopal Divakaran. Neha Karande is a Designer at HPS India, part of a team that works closely with HPS engineering centres in France and Germany.
The Chapter in the Textbook That Changed Things
Neha grew up in a family that valued practical education and a stable career. When it was time to choose a path, her family suggested ITI. It was a good path, they said. You can complete ITI, then diploma, then degree, then further if you want.
She did not arrive at ITI with a fixed ambition. But there was a chapter in one of her early textbooks that laid out exactly what you could do after ITI, how one qualification led to the next, how the path could keep going as far as you chose to take it. That chapter stayed with her. Her mother reinforced it: write down your goals, make a plan, follow it.
She followed the plan. ITI, then diploma, then degree, then an MTech. And somewhere along the way, the direction her family gave her became a direction she had chosen for herself.
When the Test Results Matched the Design
By the time she reached her MTech, Neha had already decided she wanted a career in design. Not manufacturing in general. Design specifically. The part of engineering where you build something in your mind and then on paper, and then the world has to tell you whether you got it right.
She completed her MTech thesis during her internship at Cummins India, working in an R&D environment on a project related to reducing industrial pollution. Her manager there was supportive and guided her through the process. The project was technically demanding. But the moment that made it real was when she ran the tests and the results matched her design data exactly.
That is what it feels like to belong in this field. Not a conversation, not a certificate, not someone telling you that you are good enough. The numbers matching. The system behaving the way you said it would. That moment of verification, when the real world confirms what existed first only in your calculation, is what engineers live for. She enjoyed every part of it.
The Pandemic, the Classroom, and Three Years of Learning How to Explain Things
When her internship at Cummins ended, the lockdown began. For nearly a year, there was nowhere to go. When the second lockdown lifted and she started searching for work, she made a decision: whatever opportunity comes first, take it. The job mattered more than the category. What came first was a teaching position at Engineering College. She accepted it.
The first few months were hard. Teaching students online meant not knowing whether anyone was paying attention. She and her colleagues built animated presentations, created activities to test engagement mid-session, found ways to make technical content work through a screen. When offline teaching returned, she brought the same methods with her: keep it visual, keep it active, never assume the person in front of you has understood just because they have not asked a question.
She taught for three years. She enjoyed it. And she carried two things out of that classroom that she uses every single day in her current work: patience, and the ability to explain a technical idea clearly to whoever is in front of her, regardless of what they already know.
Back to Industry, Alone in the Room Again
Financial pressures eventually brought her back to industry. She joined a small electrical company as a Senior R&D Engineer. It was a different world from either teaching or R&D at Cummins: faster, less structured, with vendors to manage, production workers to coordinate, and a team that was almost entirely male.
The first few weeks were difficult. Not because anyone made things hard for her, but because everything required active communication with people who were not used to working with her, in a context where she had to establish credibility quickly without the institutional scaffolding she had had at Cummins.
She made a plan. She tracked daily progress, followed up consistently with vendors, kept records for every interaction, and kept showing up with her work. It was not dramatic. It was deliberate. The project was completed successfully. The team adjusted to her. The room that had been unfamiliar became comfortable.
She had done this before. In a classroom full of men who were not sure she belonged in an engineering college. In an R&D lab where she was completing an MTech thesis among more experienced researchers. Each time, the answer was the same: make a plan, do the work, let the results speak.
Pune to France, Every Morning at the Workstation
Neha joined HPS India just six weeks before this interview. She is in a training phase, learning the company’s products, its engineering standards, and how the Indian team fits into the global design workflow.
Every day, the India team holds a technical discussion session with HPS engineers in France. The session covers what each person is working on, what needs to be corrected, what can be improved. Neha brings GD&T knowledge and a manufacturing perspective from her previous roles. When she notices something in a design that would make life harder for the worker on the shop floor, she says so. The French engineers listen. Sometimes the Indian team’s approach is adopted. It is collaborative in the way that good engineering teams are: the idea matters more than where it came from.
Her manager Nuno Baioneta in France is supportive. Director Gopal Divakaran in Pune is supportive. Whenever something new arrives at the workstation, the team is gathered, it is explained, and they are shown how it connects to the manufacturing process. She is learning fast and she knows it.
Six weeks in, she has already completed her first project. It was a small one: replicating a component in software, then reviewing the drawings closely enough to find the details that were not quite right from a manufacturing standpoint. She flagged them. The team incorporated the feedback. The project was done. She was proud. It was a cheerful moment, she says.
What Neha Would Tell the Girls Sitting in the Back Row
When Neha was teaching at Engineering College, she noticed something. There were always a few girls in her classes who were more hesitant. Not less capable. Hesitant. As if they were waiting for proof that this field would eventually accept them before they committed to it. She understands that hesitation. Mechanical engineering is challenging at the start, especially for women who are often the only one or one of very few in the room. The beginning is harder. That is just true.
But the beginning is not the whole story. Stay curious, she says. Be patient. Work hard. Do not just try to get through the job. Try to understand it, to enjoy it, because when you love what you are doing, you do not get tired of it. It keeps giving you more.
Her own career is the evidence. From a textbook chapter about career paths in Karad, to a Cummins R&D lab, to a pandemic classroom, to a shop floor, to a design workstation in Pune talking to engineers in France. She adapted every time. She kept building. “Stay curious. Keep learning. Build your own path.”
