One family,
seventy years deep.
Three generations, one trade, one town. A founder who learned the work as a drilling hand and ended up creating an industry that did not exist in India before him. A son who brought the most capable rig in the world into the country, and then built one that goes deeper. A third generation trained in mechatronics, bringing automation to a craft that has only ever been learned standing on a rig floor. The company has never been sold, never been split, and has never left Dera Bassi.
Sardar Gurnam Singh Saini
Learned the trade as a drilling hand in 1951 and founded the company at Dera Bassi in 1955, creating India's private well-drilling industry from nothing. Conferred Punjab State's highest award in 1991. Author of a published memoir of the journey.
5 December 1932 — 15 September 2010
Sardar Gurdarshan Singh Saini
Brought the Foremost Dual Rotary rig from Canada — the first in India — and led the in-house design of the one-kilometre reverse rotary rig. Conferred Punjab State's highest award in 2008. Senior Member of the National Ground Water Association (USA) and the Australian Drilling Industry Association.
His public life, advisory role and environmental mission are set out on the Sewa & Public Life page.
Hardeep Singh Saini
B.E. Mechanical Engineering; M.E. Mechatronics, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Third generation of the family to run the company.
Leads modernisation of the fleet — automation, mechatronic systems, intelligent machinery and modern control systems — and the company's move toward environmentally responsible groundwater engineering. His brief is to carry a seventy-year-old trade into a form that will still be current in another seventy.
Amandeep Singh Saini
B.E. Mechanical. Director, Gurnam Singh & Company, and third generation of the family in the trade.
The engineering training is not decorative here. This is a company that fabricates, rebuilds and modifies its own machinery rather than buying its way past a problem, and directing that work means being able to read a rig as well as a contract. His attention sits with the fleet and the works at Chandigarh — what is serviceable, what is due, and what has to be built rather than ordered.
Harkamaldeep Singh Saini
B.E. Mechanical. Director, Gurnam Singh & Company, and third generation of the family in the trade.
A well is designed on paper and then argued with by the ground. His work sits on the delivery side of that argument — projects, crews and the decisions a job demands once drilling has started and the formation turns out to be something other than the survey promised. Seventy years of accumulated judgement is only useful if somebody is on hand to apply it.