Inspiring India: Quiet Innovations, Giant Impact

In 1999, as India’s tech sector celebrated Y2K contracts and pharmaceutical companies courted global markets, Pankaj and Vipin Lidoo were fixated on something decidedly unglamorous: fasteners. The brothers had identified a critical vulnerability in India’s booming construction sector. Self-drilling screws—essential components for the new color-coated sheet technology transforming Indian architecture—were available from only one source: Taiwan.

The entire construction industry was hostage to foreign suppliers for something as basic as a screw,” recalls Pankaj Lidoo, now Managing Director of Landmark Crafts. “We realized that India’s infrastructure dreams were literally being held together by imported fasteners.” The supply chain math was brutal.

Every construction delay, every cost overrun, every project timeline stretched because builders had to wait weeks for specialized screws to arrive from across the Indian Ocean. The Lidoo brothers saw more than an inefficiency—they saw a business opportunity wrapped in a nationalist mission.

Rather than profit from the import trade, they took the harder path. Multiple research trips to Taiwan. Heavy R&D investments. Technology transfer negotiations. By the early 2000s, they had established India’s first indigenous manufacturing facility for selfdrilling screws in Ghaziabad— betting their future on a product most entrepreneurs considered too mundane to matter. But the Lidoo brothers understood that one-size-fits-all wouldn’t work in a country as diverse as India. In Himachal Pradesh’s timberheavy construction zones, they supplied wood-specific solutions.

Along Karnataka’s coastline, anticorrosive variants battled salt-laden air. This geographic customization became their competitive edge, earning partnerships across metro systems in multiple cities.

“In every assembled product, there is a fastener holding the structure strong and safe,” Pankaj explains. “We provide the strength you may not see, but you can always trust.” Today, Landmark operates ISO 9001:2015-certified facilities in Panchkula, backed by a CRISIL SME1 rating. Their portfolio has expanded to aluminium blind rivets and drywall screws, with concrete wall screws in development. A network of 10-11 marketing offices ensures nationwide reach. The company’s journey mirrors India’s manufacturing evolution— from import dependence to indigenous capability. Landmark embodied “Make in India” decades before it became policy, transforming from resellers of Taiwanese technology to suppliers for the nation’s most critical infrastructure. In an age of unicorn valuations and disruption rhetoric, Landmark Crafts represents a different metric of success: measured not in market buzz but in structural integrity, not in venture funding but in industrial self-reliance.

Sometimes the smallest components enable the biggest transformations. And sometimes, the most profound revolutions happen one screw at a time.