When people talk of the fuel price rise, not many would remember the 1973 OIL SHOCK. The retail petrol prices went up from 33 paise to 95 paise; almost 200% increase. It was also the time that the Indian Industry had no use for engineering intelligence. In the Cost Plus economy, the managements were interested only in increasing the production, Engineering was fully oriented towards maintenance or importing new machines; The intelligence was used in how to get Import license from the government. (This negative reason being the only spark to keep the innovative low cost machine builders active and alive). A fresh engineer was no more than a supervisor for man management; Even there, all important decisions were made between unions and management. Thus, the shop union leader was more powerful than the shop engineer. Those who did move up were those who with lots of patience, could be simultaneously tough and friendly with the workers. In this atmosphere, Jayaraman chose to improve productivity with the unions ruling the roost, the other forms of productivity improvement were left to those who could “Manage” the work force. The energy usage was such a neglected sector, he was able to achieve a saving of more than 60% in fuel consumption in the first Job with the enfield group.

With burning ambition to be on his own , but with no back up, He worked in different companies, all with innovation or energy conservation as core and to pick up production, development and sales experience in a short time.

He had an opportunity to do the first energy audit in 1981 and till 1991 , was involved in Energy Audits all over India (which is still continued as a division of SECO)

During this period, He was the first person to introduce High efficiency Flat belts instead of V belts for energy conservation.

It was in 1991, the house designed by him had incorporated “Passive Sewage treatment” and “Rain Water Harvesting” When these terms were not even in the vocabulary of many people.