In the early 80s HMT watches had released the economy series watches with the regular 0231 regular hand-winding movement. These were quite inexpensive watches as the name suggest and and were released to attract youth and teenage customers.
The case and strap of these watches were made out of plastic with a regular steel movement and printed dial. HMT Appu watches which were released to commemorate the Asiad Games of 1982 were based on this watch.
As far as i know this watch, doctors watch and the pocket watches are the only mechanical watches from HMT without the model number or name on the dial.
Instead of becoming a favourite of young customers these watches failed at the watch counters and registered very poor sales because of a flaw in them – the case of these watches were made of plastic and in the Indian climatic conditions it would not last for long and crack open. HMT is known to make sturdy watches that outlive its customer’s life span and it was a minimal expectation that its customers had from all their HMT watches including these watches.
These watches therefore got a very lukewarm response and company therefore decided to stop its production as a result these were not released in large numbers. The unsold watches were disassembled and the dials, movement and hands were used in different watches. A few quartz watches were also released with similar dials. I was surprised to see these watches in steel cases once in a while and upon doing a bit of research got to know that when a customer would come back to HMT with a cracked case within or outside of the warranty period they would request for a steel case instead of the plastic one and therefore often one would see these dials in different steel HMT cases, more because of the wearers convenience a departure from the way HMT had designed it.
 |
| Cracked case as shown in the picture |
