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The expression 'heavy-duty verbs in operation', in fact, refers to 'heavy-duty' verbs which are also operation-words like 'make', 'put', 'take', 'keep', 'let', 'give', 'get', 'go', 'come' and 'do'. The verbs selected for study--'do', 'get', 'give', 'make' and 'take'--are frequently used and are some of the most complex verbs in the English language, as they often do not have any specific meaning of their own; generally, they derive their meaning from the nouns or adjectives that follows them. They are widely used in phrasal and idiomatic expressions in collocation with particles. To provide a definitive description of Indian English collocations of these verbs, the entire one-million word Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English was used as source material. Instances of Indian English data were referred first to the sense definitions given in the corpus-based COBUILD dictionary. The instances which did not conform to the native English usage in COBUILD were then compared with those in LOB (British) and 'Brown' (American) corpora. Instances which appeared to be peculiar to Indian English were thereafter referred to some native speakers for attestation. Usages which were unacceptable to the native speakers were put down as peculiar to Indian English and were subjected to detailed analysis to discover constraints and distinctive typical tendencies. The study of these two-part verbs in Indian English showed that Indian English makes frequent use of these operation-words or verbalizers with substantives to form verbs and that the words that collocate with these verbs in Indian English differ to some extent from those in the native varieties. Moreover, the source of such two-part verbs may be the influence of Indian languages. In most Indian languages, many verb expressions are made up of two parts. The verbs 'get', 'take' and 'give' display higher percentages of deviations as compared to verbs 'do' and 'make'. Obviously, 'do' and 'make' are largely synonymous like 'get' and 'take'. But it appears that the choice between 'do' and 'make' in Indian English is more blurred than the choice between 'get' and 'take'. Quantitatively, it appears that the absolute frequencies of deviant instances in the Indian data are low. In other words, the bulk of Indian English data conforms to the native English usage. This confirms the 'common core' hypothesis regarding variety features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]