reflections

Energy Security and India

2012-01-08T22:16:00.000+05:30

Energy Security and India

It is clear that India cannot rely on one source of electricity: be it coal; gas; hydro or nuclear. The bouquet will have all these components. This requires rational and pragmatic planning and not dogmas and fundamentalism of irrational prejudices, says Shivanand Kanavi.

Indian energy consumption profile is varied. We use bio mass like agricultural waste and animal waste like cow dung and wood, char coal for heating and cooking purposes as well as refinery products like kerosene and LPG. While a small amount of electrified transportation has been adopted by the railways most other transportation by road and water is dependent on diesel and to a lesser extent petrol both of which are refinery products. Industry depends on electricity as well as coal and fuel oil or diesel for its energy needs.

Today we are importing over 80% of our oil needs which gets refined into kerosene, LPG, petrol, diesel, fuel oil, naphtha etc hence not only all our energy needs but also fertilisers and plastics needs are susceptible to international crude prices. Even though India has recoverable coal of about 70-80 billion tons, our needs are rising and our annual coal consumption has crossed 800 million tons. Due to various restrictions on coal mining due to environmental or forest issues or bottlenecks in railways for internal transportation; imports of coal from South Africa, Australia and Indonesia are rising and many Indian companies are buying mines in these countries to secure these supplies and building plants in India along the western and eastern coastline. Imported coal is expensive but it has already reached over 110 million tons this year and is expected to rise dramatically as energy needs increase. Thus our economy is not only dependent on international crude prices but also coal prices which are again getting linked to crude prices as natural gas prices already have.

Electrification is an important component of modernising the country’s productive forces and increasing the quality of life of people.

Lenin in the emerging Soviet Union realised it very clearly and accordingly the GOELRO ("State Commission for Electrification of Russia") was set up as early as 1920. He endorsed the slogan, ‘The age of steam is the age of the bourgeoisie, the age of electricity is the age of socialism.’ He said in a report in Feb 1920, “We must show the peasants that the organisation of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease and barbarism. We shall tackle the problem as soon as we have dealt with our current, basic task, and we shall not allow ourselves to be deflected for a single moment from the fundamental practical task.”

The Soviet Plan included construction of a network of 30 regional power plants, including ten large hydroelectric power plants, and numerous electric-powered large industrial enterprises. It was intended to increase the total national power output per year to 8.8 billion kWh, as compared to 1.9 billion kWh of the Imperial Russia in 1913.The Plan was basically fulfilled by 1931.

India’s current per capita electricity consumption is less than 750 KWH per annum where as it is already 1500 in China. It is to be noted that in almost all economic indicators like electricity, steel, telecom etc India and China were on par in 1991. The consumption in advanced countries of Europe and North America is much higher, while the world average itself is 2500 KWH per capita. There are still over 10% villages which are not electrified and according to 2009 data 33% of rural households and 6% of urban households still do not have access to electricity.

The current profile of electricity generation in India is as follows:

http://powermin.gov.in/indian_electricity_scenario/introduction.htm

1.Total Installed Capacity:

Sector	MW	%age
State Sector	83,563.65	45.74
Central Sector	56,572.63	30.96
Private Sector	42,553.34	23.29
Total	1,82,689.62

Fuel	MW	%age
Total Thermal	119040.98	65.16
Coal	100,098.38	54.79
Gas	17,742.85	9.71
Oil	1,199.75	0.65
Hydro (Renewable)	38,706.40	21.18
Nuclear	4,780.00	2.61
RES** (MNRE)	20,162.24	11.03
Total	1,82,689.62	100.00

The demand in India for electricity far outstrips supply reportedly the shortage varies between 8-12%, which amounts to a huge 15,000—20,000 MW of power. Leave alone rural areas even large cities and giant metropolises are subjected to regular load shedding that is brown outs and black outs. There have been many instances of riots in many provinces especially during the sowing season due to these brown outs. India needs rapid electrification to raise the standard of living as well as for agriculture and industry.

In terms of medium and long term planning, Indian coal needs to be mined efficiently. However it has large amount of silica, which appears as large amount of fly ash in power stations, when it is burnt. This ash needs to be disposed of in a way that does not harm the surrounding air and rivers and lakes. However much needs to be done in this respect. Imported coal has much higher calorific value but also has sulphur and nitrogenous content which leads to large release of sulphuric and nitric acids during rain, that is dangerous to forests and environment. The fact that open pit mining itself needs to be handled properly to limit the damage to the environment is only recently being addressed in India. According to scientific studies, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.

From the long term energy security perspective Indian coal reserves will get exhausted in less than 50 years. Even worldwide the coal reserves are shrinking and increasing reliance on imported coal will lead to Indian economy being more and more at the mercy of global coal prices as it is already in the case of oil prices. This is in addition to the extraordinary burden that will be borne by our ports and railways for carrying coal. The effect on green house gases and climate and effect of ash on pulmonary diseases and people’s health is a separate thing to be worried about. Coal already provides 65% of power capacity and will likely play a major role in the future also.

Natural gas offers a much cleaner alternative and power stations can also be set up quickly. However while some discoveries of natural gas have been made by ONGC and Reliance they are still relatively small. Imported gas through pipelines of Central Asia, Iran, Bangladesh and Myanmar will also be expensive since the gas prices are linked today to oil prices, even if political relations with these and intervening countries were permitting such pipelines. More over gas is required for urea fertiliser, plastics and steel industry as well and there will be a scramble for the same. Thus gas will play a small role as it does at present (10%).

Methane from Coal Beds is another source that is being explored in Eastern India. Recently ONGC has drilled a R&D well for shale gas in Bangla and studies are continuing. Shale Gas has been great new success story in energy and has meteorically risen to provide 25% of gas in US. However new environmental concerns are being raised about the chemicals that are used in hydraulic fracking to release the gas from layers deep down. However, like coal bed methane it also promises to be another source of much needed gas for India.

It is believed that India sits on a large ocean of gas hydrates at great depths. However the technology to exploit these is not yet available globally and may provide a resource in the future.

Hydroelectricity is a renewable source of energy since we expect every rainy season to fill up our dams. However due to its high population density such dams lead to large scale submersion of villages and forests causing social displacement and tension. Himalayas have great hydroelectric potential and that is why dams are being built feverishly in Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Jammu & Kashmir. But Himalayas are very young mountains and there is a lot of soil erosion and the dams would be silted heavily very soon besides the dams affecting forests and submersion. That is why there is strong opposition to these dams in the hill states even though we have tapped a very small amount of this potential. Thus hydro’s contribution to power generation will remain at about the current levels of 20% and falling.

Many NGO’s believing in the mantra of “small is beautiful”, say that mini and micro hydro projects are the answers to India’s energy problems. However, the facts on the ground show that such potential is hardly 2,500 MW and that too at a high cost per megawatt making it hardly a panacea.

State Wise Numbers And Aggregate Capacity Of Small hydro projects (Upto 25 Mw) Installed & Under Implementation (AS ON 31.3.2009)

Sl. No.	State	Projects Installed		Projects under Implementation
Sl. No.	State	Nos.	Capacity (MW)	Nos.	Capacity (MW)
1	Andhra Pradesh	59	180.83	12	21.50
2	Arunachal Pradesh	81	61.32	43	25.94
3	Assam	4	27.1	4	15.00
4	Bihar	12	54.60	4	3.40
5	Chattisgarh	5	18.050	1	1.00
6	Goa	1	0.050	-	-
7	Gujarat	2	7.000	2	5.60
8	Haryana	5	62.700	1	6.00
9	Himachal Pradesh	79	230.915	9	26.75
10	J&K	32	111.830	5	5.91
11	Jharkhand	6	4.050	8	34.85
12	Karnataka	83	563.45	14	85.25
13	Kerala	19	133.87	2	3.2
14	Madhya Pradesh	10	71.16	4	19.90
15	Maharashtra	29	211.325	5	31.20
16	Manipur	8	5.450	3	2.75
17	Meghalaya	4	31.030	3	1.70
18	Mizoram	18	24.470	1	8.50
19	Nagaland	10	28.670	4	4.20
20	Orissa	8	44.300	6	23.93
21	Punjab	29	123.900	2	18.75
22	Rajasthan	10	23.850	-	-
23	Sikkim	16	47.110	2	5.20
24	Tamil Nadu	15	90.050	4	13.00
25	Tripura	3	16.010	-	-
26	Uttar Pradesh	9	25.100	-	-
27	Uttarakhand	93	127.92	33	40.35
28	West Bengal	23	98.400	16	79.25
29	A&N Islands	1	5.250	-	-
Total		674	2429.77	188	483.23

Recently wind farms have come up in several regions. However inherently wind in India is not enough to produce power efficiently unlike in some Nordic countries. It has been estimated that the efficiency of production from wind is around 35%-25% in Europe and North America but only about 15% in the windy regions of India. More over wind farms also require large amount of land which is a problem in land starved India. Of course one has to keep in mind that wind can only add on to an existing steady base level of production in the grid and cannot be relied upon for continuous supply. Though India has impressive figures in wind energy installation, it is a known fact that it has become a source of exploiting tax loop holes for corporations and not a serious supply of energy to the grid.

Many people believe that India having been blessed with ample amounts of sun light, Solar would be a natural choice as a major source of electricity. Converting sunlight to electricity is a very expensive process and it currently costs about 4 times the conventional. Even though the technology is more than 100 years old a lot more advancement has to happen in basic research in new materials to convert sunlight to electricity more efficiently (currently it is only 12-16%) and cheaply. More over people who claim that solar is environmentally friendly do not understand that the silicon chip making process uses some of the most toxic chemicals, which are then let out as effluents. In addition solar electricity needs to be stored in expensive and environmentally harmful lead batteries, since there is no Sun in the night. Thus environmental friendliness of solar technology is a myth till further advances in science and technology of materials, efficiency and storage happen in perhaps the next 50 years. We should also recognise that solar plants of say even a modest 1000 MW require several square kilometres of land.

India has very little geothermal potential though there are hot water geysers in the Himalayan region.

India has developed nuclear power reactors using natural uranium and has been improving the technology in the last 40 years. India does not yet have the technology of enriched uranium reactors and is hence planning to import them from Russia, France and US. Indian Uranium resources are of very small and of very low quality. However the opening up international trade in nuclear materials in 2008 by the Nuclear Suppliers Group has allowed India to import Uranium from large Uranium producing countries like Kazakhstan. In the future it can also do so from Canada and Australia. India has also developed the technology to process the radioactive waste from these reactors and extract useful plutonium from the waste. This reprocessing of fuel has largely resolved the waste disposal problem, which is very serious in North America and Europe. This plutonium has been used for making bombs as well as to develop power generation in Fast Breeder Reactors. In fact that is the reason this technology has been suppressed by US and other powers. The first such large Indian reactor is soon coming online in Kalpakkam near Chennai and will take India to the cutting edge of this technology globally. India is also blessed with large amounts of Thorium. The first Thorium reactor of the world has also been designed by India and the construction of this on an experimental basis will start soon. The world will be looking forward to this innovation.

Nuclear reactors are small in size but need a radius of few kilometres around them to be free of human habitation to diminish the danger to human life in the highly unlikely case of an accident. So far, in the nearly 42 years of operation there have been no serious accidents in Indian reactors. Today’s reactors have been designed to take care of many accidental scenarios of earthquakes, tsunamis or any other natural calamity that can damage the reactor. The reactors are being designed to safely shut down in an emergency. Thus no radiation can be leaked to the environment.

Uranium mining, handling, reactor operation and maintenance are all potential sources of radiation exposure to workers. Thus extreme care has to be taken during the entire cycle and no chalta hai attitude will work. Once plutonium has been removed from the waste the rest can be disposed of easily.

However many people ask, “Is it dangerous?” Since radiation is invisible it leads to many irrational fears. Yes it is and needs extremely well trained staff to handle it at all stages. However looking at the energy security in the future, nuclear especially with fast breeders and thorium reactors is a source that can provide electricity at competitive rates to the teaming Indians for more than 100 years.

We can only have a few nuclear islands in our densely populated country. Hence the idea has been developed to use these limited number of islands effectively by building several reactors on one site. Considering the strengths and weaknesses of other sources of electricity available to us, which have been discussed above, nuclear remains an important source of energy security for India in the long term as our planet’s fossil fuels dwindle and become extremely expensive. It is also environmentally benign due to no carbon emission or fly ash disposal and other problems.

It is clear that India cannot rely on one source of electricity: be it coal (domestic or imported); gas (domestic or imported); hydro or nuclear. The bouquet will have all these components. The weight of different components in the bouquet can change as economic costs and environmental costs vary in the future. This requires rational and pragmatic planning and not dogmas and irrational prejudices.

The problems of land acquisition and rehabilitation exist in all large industrial and urbanisation projects and are not peculiar to nuclear projects as in Jaitapur. Any state needs to handle these appropriately. However the concerns on safety, technology etc can be addressed in a rational discussion. We need to see the energy scenario 20-50 years ahead and prepare for it while trying to address the rising expectation of people in terms of living standards and energy availability for the same. After all electricity and transportation will see a sea change in common man’s life in rural and urban India.

Sam Pitroda: Telecom Revolution

2011-11-01T15:04:00.001+05:30

This profile appeared in India Abroad, New York, Oct 21, 2011

Making of a Revolution

Sam and Indian Telecom

Shivanand Kanavi looks back at the ingenious ways in which Sam Pitroda connected billion Indians

Sun Microsystems, the famous Silicon Valley computer maker, of the‘80s, used to have an ad line a few years ago, which said: “We are the dot in.com”. Obviously, the slogan was meant to advertise Sun’s role in Internetinfrastructure. If one were to coin a similar slogan for C-DOT, then it wouldbe: “C-DOT is the com in Indian telecom”.

Until the 1980s, Indian telecom was dominated entirely byelectromechanical switches. This was one of the main reasons for bad telephoneservice. The Indian government was then looking at ways of modernising telecom.An obvious option was to import digital switches from the US, Japan or Europe.While this was the fastest route, there were primarily three drawbacks to it:

• India had meagre foreign exchange resources.

• The switches made by multinational companies were designed to handlea large number of lines (up to 100,000), and hence suited large cities. Theydid not have small switches that could handle about 100-200 lines, or theintermediate-range ones the country needed to spread telecom to small towns andlarge villages in India.

• It would have meant no incentive for indigenous R&D.

The question was, could India afford to spend enough money to developits own switch and manufacture it at a competitive price? Even the mostoptimistic advocates of indigenous effort were sceptical, and they preferred totake the route of licensed production in agreement with a foreign multinationalcompany. The CEO of a large multinational wrote to Prime Minister IndiraGandhi, cautioning her that his company had invested more than a billiondollars in developing the technology, and implying that it would be foolhardyfor India to attempt to re-invent the wheel with its limited resources.

That accepted wisdom needed challenging. And the person who could dareto do so was Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based telecom engineer from Orissa, who hadstudied in the US and participated in the development and evolution of digitalswitching technology. Pitroda had over thirty patents in the technology whileworking at GTE and later at Rockwell.

As an entrepreneur, he had done very well for himself financially.

In the early 1980s, he heard from a friend that Prime Minister IndiraGandhi had set up a high-level committee to look into the modernization ofIndian telecommunications. He thought it was time he paid his dues to hiscountry of origin. Having seen poverty and social discrimination in hischildhood in his village, and now having become a participant in the worldwideIT revolution, Pitroda had no doubt that a modern telecom infrastructure wouldgo a long way “in promoting openness, accessibility, accountability,connectivity, democracy, decentralisation—all the ‘soft’ qualities so essentialto effective social, economic, and political development,” as he wrote later inthe Harvard Business Review (DevelopmentDemocracy, and the Village Telephone—Sam Pitroda, HarvardBusiness Review, Nov-Dec 1993).

Pitroda brought along with him his knowledge of technology, a ‘can do’attitude and an impressive silvery mane he tossed while making a point, but notmuch else. He brought a breath of fresh air of optimism, aggression,confidence, flamboyance and media savvy into Indian telecom. He offered hisservices to the Indian government for one rupee a year.

And the offer was taken.

To recap the situation, in 1980, India had fewer than 2.5 milliontelephones, almost all of them in a handful of urban centres. In fact, sevenper cent of the country’s urban population had fifty-five per cent of thenation’s telephones. The country had only twelve thousand public telephones forseven hundred million people, and ninety-seven per cent of India’s six hundredthousand villages had no telephones at all.

“India, like most of the Third World, was using its foreign exchangeto buy the West’s abandoned technology and install obsolete equipment thatdoomed the poor to move like telecom snails where Europeans, Americans andJapanese were beginning to move like information greyhounds,” asserts Pitrodain his characteristic fashion. “The technological disparity was getting bigger,not smaller. India and countries like her were falling farther and fartherbehind not just in the ability to chat with relatives or call the doctor but,much more critically, in the capacity to coordinate development activities,pursue scientific study, conduct business, operate markets, and participatemore fully in the international community. I was perfectly certain that nolarge country entirely lacking an indigenous electronics industry could hope tocompete economically in the coming century. To survive, India had tobring telecommunications to its towns and villages; to thrive, it had to do itwith Indian talent and Indian technology”, Pitroda added in his article.

Many discussions over three years, plus flying back and forth betweenNew Delhi and Chicago, led to the establishment of C-DOT, the Centre forDevelopment of Telematics. C-DOT was registered as a non-profit society fundedby the government but enjoying complete autonomy. The Indian parliament agreedto allocate $36 million to C-DOT over 36 months to develop a digital switchingsystem suited to the Indian network.

“We found five rooms in a rundown government hotel, and we went towork using beds as desks,” says Pitroda of those early days. “A few monthslater, in October 1984, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, and her son Rajiv becameprime minister. He and I decided that I should press ahead with the initiativefor all it was worth.”

According to Pitroda, C-DOT engineers were conspicuously young, andthey never seemed to sleep or rest. “C-DOT was much more than an engineeringproject. It did, of course, test the technical ability of our young engineersto design a whole family of digital switching systems and associated softwaresuited to India’s peculiar conditions. But it was also an exercise in nationalself-assurance. Years earlier, India’s space and nuclear programmes had giventhe country pride in its scientific capability. Now C-DOT had the chance toresurrect that pride.”

By 1987, within the three-year limit, C-DOT had delivered a 128-linerural exchange, a 128-line private automatic branch exchange for businesses, asmall central exchange with a capacity of 512 lines, and was working on a10,000-line exchange. The components for all these exchanges wereinterchangeable for maximum flexibility in design, installation and repairs,and all of it was being manufactured in India to international standards—aguaranteed maximum of one hour’s downtime in twenty years of service! There wasone problem; C-DOT had fallen short on one goal—the large urban exchange wasbehind schedule—but, overall, it had proved itself a colossal, resoundingsuccess.

What about the heat and dust in India and the need for air-conditionedrooms for digital switches? This was a serious issue for the country, largeparts of which do not get a continuous supply of electricity. The solution wassimple but ingenious. “First, to produce less heat, we used low-powermicroprocessors and other devices that made the exchanges work just slightlyslower. Secondly, we spread out the circuitry to give it a little moreopportunity to ‘breathe’. The cabinet had to be sealed against dust, of course,but by making the whole assembly a little larger than necessary, we created anopportunity for heat to rise internally to the cabinet cover and dissipate,”explains Pitroda.

The final product was a metal container about three feet by two feetby three feet, costing about $8,000, that required no air-conditioning andcould be installed in a protected space somewhere in a village. It could switchphone calls more or less indefinitely in the heat and dust of an Indian summeras well as through the torrential Indian monsoon.

By November 2002, C-DOT switches equipped over 44,000 exchanges allover India. In the rural areas, ninety-one per cent of the telephone networksuse C-DOT switches. Every village has not been covered yet, but we are gettingthere. Nationwide, 16 million lines, that is, forty per cent of the total operationallines in India, are covered by C-DOT switches.

Pitroda and Rajiv Gandhi also decided to open up the technology to theprivate sector. So C-DOT rapidly transferred the technology to over 680manufacturers, who have supplied equipment worth Rs 7,230 crore and created35,000 jobs in electronics. Seeing the ruggedness of these rural exchanges,many developing countries, such as Bhutan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ghana, CostaRica, Ethiopia, Nepal, Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda and Yemen decided to try themout.

For any institution, sustaining the initial zeal is hard once theimmediate goals are achieved. After C-DOT’s goals were achieved, the Indiantelecom sector has gone through, and is still going through, a regulatory andtechnological upheaval. But that has not deterred C-DOT’s engineers.

“It is creditable that through all this turbulence C-DOT has moved onto produce optical fibre transmission equipment, VSAT equipment, upgrading itsswitches to ISDN, intelligent networking, and even mobile switching technology.Today C-DOT may not be as high profile as it was in the 1980s, but it continuesto provide essential hardware and software for Indian telecom despite intensecompetition from global vendors,” says Bishnu Pradhan, a telecom expert who wasamong C-DOT leaders between 1990 and 1996.

THE STD BOOTH: A BRILLIANT SOLUTION FOR LOW TELEDENSITY

Before we move on to other parts of the communications revolution, letus note a characteristically Indian innovation not so much in technology as inmanagement, which led to quantum leap in connectivity. That is the lowly publiccall office, or PCO, found at every street corner all over India today. ThesePCOs gave easy access to those who couldn’t afford telephones, and broughtsubscriber trunk dialing to millions of Indians.

Public call offices are a part of any network anywhere in the world,so what is innovative about India’s PCOs? The innovation lies in privatelymanaged PCOs. As a result, we have over 600,000 small entrepreneurs runningthese booths and the telecom companies’ income from long distance telephony hasmultiplied manifold.

The innovation also lies in realising that Indian society isessentially frugal in nature, and is amenable to sharing resources. WhatPitroda did was to translate the Indian village and small town experience ofsharing newspapers into the telecommunications scenario.

Sam Pitroda: An Interview

2011-11-01T14:59:00.003+05:30

This interview appeared in India Abroad, New York, Oct 21, 2011

"We need to redesign the nation"

Sam Pitroda has advisedmore than half a dozen prime ministers of India over the last three decadesregarding technology applications and policy. Shivanand Kanavi captures the highlights of this rich experience in a conversation.

How did your engagement with government of India as atechnology advisor start nearly thirty years ago?

In the early 80`scomputers were just becoming more and more viable in terms of desktop, that wasthe time Rajiv Gandhi came into the mainstream of politics as a young MP inIndia. He was visionary and was himself technology savvy. He saw that computerscould play very imp role. I had background in telecom, IT, and software in theUS and I was also young and because of my background in telecom, I decided tolook at telecom as an instrument of change in nation building.

How did C-DOT come along?

Mrs Gandhi and RajivGandhi gave me an opportunity to set up C-DOT (Center for Development of Telematics)to develop indigenous technology for India’s effort to digitize networks. Thenwe had electro-mechanicals [switches]. However we were going digital so weneeded products, and one idea was to get products and technologies from MNCs likeAlcatel and another approach was to develop indigenously using Indiantalent to meet Indian needs like rural telephony,smaller exchange that can withstand Indian climate; dust; high temp and all ofthat, so my entry into India was to essentially focus on digital networks, developrural telecom through C-DOT.

Were you not part of the “computer boys” of Rajiv Gandhi’s era?

Collectively we allfelt computers have a role to play not only in telecom but also in other areasand if we really want people to see the benefits of IT then we need to apply itquickly in areas where average Indian could see the advantage. Otherwise theywould all say, look this is all fancy stuff only for the rich, urban, elite etc.Many used to say ‘what does this guy know about rural areas? Rural India isvery different’. People used to tell me you should work on agriculture, drinkingwater and sanitation. I used to say ‘you are right, but I don’t know anythingabout it. You need to find an agriculture or a water expert. I happen to knowabout IT & telecom so I can only work on it, my knowledge is limited, butthere are so many other things going on in the world like biotech, nanotech I don’tknow anything about it so I have to focus on what I know and someone else hasto focus on other areas’.

How did the idea of computerisation of Indian railways’passenger reservation system, which celebrates s Silver Jubilee this year,originate? That actually changed people’s perceptions on the ground.

Rajiv was convincedthat technology can be an instrument of change. We said we must look for areawhich affects large number of people. Many people wait at the railway stations e.g.a person is waiting at the railway station window no 6 to get a ticket toNagpur and you get all the way up to the line and when you say you want aticket to Nagpur you are told that you have to go to window no 7 and so youhave to start all over again. The hassle of getting railway ticket, going tostation for booking it etc all that was a painful experience for every citizen.So we thought how about using this for railway reservation.

Problem however were theunions. They were going to be against it as the general impression was that computerstake away jobs and that automation is not good. ‘Automation is for the west notfor India and India should not automate anything. We should focus on labourintensive technology. We have more people we need to create more jobs so manualis the only way to do it’.

How did you overcome the resistance to the idea?

Unions reacted saying ‘noway’ we will allow this to happen. We started dialogue with unions saying thisis important in the long-run and in passengers’ interest. In one of theconversations somebody figured out that if we put computers we would need tohave Air-Conditioned rooms so people will benefit from the better workconditions and environments. So we said let’s try it in some place and create aPOC (Proof Of Concept). We told the board, ‘give us a slot to try and if youare not happy, unions are not happy then we will revisit’. So people agreedthat we should try. Dr P P Gupta the then CMD of CMC was very happy. He wasgiven the mandate to prove the concept. CMC was seen as a new organization; dynamicand innovative. We had the talent in CMC to do this kind of things. After a lotof effort, when we showed the unions that it can work, then we saw change.

In India at that point in time we also didn’t have thecapabilities, if there had been RFPs then they would have surely gone to theIBMs of the world but then the mood was ‘indigenous development’. When provedthe concept, people saw it and said consumer would substantially benefit fromit as they won’t have to go through the hassle, but then the challenge was howwe did it. Even today revenue-wise freight is more important, but we wanted tolook at benefit for consumer because then the acceptance for computers overallat a national level would be better, so in a sense it was a railway project butit was more than that. It was a project to prove to all stakeholders; ourconsumers in many fields and unions in many fields that automation is not bad.Computers are not bad. They will upgrade the jobs. Now your people will work inAC. All those things were critical.

What about wider adoption of IT in the railway operations?

That’s how the CRIS (Centrefor Railway Information Systems) was born. Besides reservation there are lotsof other things but it took 20yrs for people to embrace this whole idea in a bigway. Reservation and ticketing was an instant success. People thought it was amiracle and I would say this was the first grand success for IT in India. Bythen C-DOT was rolling and exchanges and telecom modernisation were seen as theimportant.

Going back to the railways story, don’t you think we coulduse technology to make them safer?

In the Indian Railways,we have huge possibility to use IT for travelling, traffic billing, we havebuilt the highway we want satellite based or GSM based real time monitoringanti-collision device etc. All of that it is very simple. Indian Railway has40,000 kms of its own optical fibre they are trying to put another 10000 so ITis becoming important in railways in traffic building. Many people die atrailway crossings everywhere. We could give the person manning it this littledevice, which listens to the train coming in and gives an alarm signal thattrain coming so get off the track. Technology should be used to prevent suchdeaths. Very soon many technology initiatives of Indian railways are going tobe announced.

There were also other technology missions….

Yes more technologymissions came in where we could take technology to address the routine problemsof people related to water, literacy, immunization, edible oil, and telecom. Thesewere the 5 missions to which we added dairy development as the 6^th mission.Then we started changing the mindsets. That was a big accomplishment in acountry of then 800 million people-to convince people that technology issomething that is positive. Technology is not bad it is not urban, exotic, fancy.To me in those 5 years this was the main accomplishment and it will benefit ouryoung.

What are your current preoccupations?

Today we are nation ofconnected millions, unfortunately people don’t quiet appreciate this bigrevolution that has happened in the history of India. So far we were a nationof unconnected millions, now we are all connected in some fashion. You canreach Kashmir, Mizoram, Kanya Kumari just like that. So what does it mean for anation going forward? How do you redesign the strategies based on connectivity for development? Shouldwe go around doing the same thing that we have done in the past and not noticethe fact that we are a nation of a billion connected now? Something hugehappened in last decade let’s sit back and take advantage of it. How do we do everythingwe do today, differently? I think that’s the main challenge how do we examinegovernance, public services.

So what it means isthat now we need to redesign the nation, if I may use that word. How do we getbirth certificate, how do we get land record, how we can file a police report.Today when I file a police report in kerala somebody in Maharashtra can’t readit due to different format, different column, and names do we standardize thatso that when a police report is filed in Kerala it is available in Maharashtra i.e. anybody inMaharashtra can read it and can we do it online because we are connected? Everythingwe do has to be rethought.

In a sense everythingwe do today is obsolete; people say we don’t have enough professors, with connectivitywe can take a great professor from IIT Kharagpur and broadcast to 2000 colleges.All of that is possible now, distance learning, e-governance all of this can bea reality. Can we provide for videoconferencing so that people don’t have to travel hours for a 5 mins meeting?What we are doing now, could have been done on Skype. So we can avoid youtravelling for an hour and half to reach this place to see me. All of these thingsare possible but this will take time to change the mindset of people. I wasonce telling PM, “a lot of people come to see you. You could schedule a 10 mininterview with a person in Kerala that individual gets up in the morning takesa flight goes to PM’s house where 15 people are waiting he is always hassled it’sgoing to be 7:30 then 7:45 then you meet for 5 mins and he says “Sirye problem hai”( Sir, such and such is a problem).. Poor guy has lostwhole day so much petrol so much time... you could do the same on videoconferencing”.

So going back to theoriginal thought we are nation of connected million and we need to do things differentlywe need to use cameras, videos, scanning to reduce travel you know to manageour cities better. We cannot manage our cities the way we have been managing. Forexample, today everybody is focused on urbanisation but their idea is Mumbaihas 18 million people and it will become 26 million in........ But we don’twant extrapolation. We need restructuring. How will I use GIS (GeographicalInformation System) to make Mumbai better. How to use scanners to make Mumbaisecure? We really need to make our cities smarter. Come up with different ideashow we improve our slums.

Where is the resistance now?

The government in asense is not technology friendly. There are young individuals like JayaramRamesh’s of the world, who are tech savvy, but there are secretaries in IT whodon’t use computers. The Department of Electronics uses manual files to makedecisions; they should computerize their files, how many people in Departmentof Electronics use computers to make decisions. They are taking decisions ontechnology but they are using manual files. But that’s the system we have. Younever see people in Indian government taking notes on a laptop, how manyministers know how to use laptops. You have to be connected you have to be ableto read your e-mails, you can’t write or call your secretary and say “dictatekarta hoon note likho” (will dictate a letter note it down) and thenmail it and then wait for the reply. Those days are over, we are a connectedpeople. We have built this nation in the last 20 years based on technology. Todayif we have over $300 billion forex reserve it is only because of technology. IThas given us great deal of global recognition, lots of global companies of ourown, lots of success stories, our advantage is we are in large numbers.

Archaeo-Metallurgy, Dr Baldev Raj, A Conversation

2011-10-02T09:14:00.000+05:30

From: Ghadar Jari Hai, Vol 5, Issue 2

http://www.ghadar.in/gjh_html/?q=content/archaeo-metallurgy-where-gods-come-alive

Dr Baldev Raj

Archaeo-metallurgy: Where Gods come alive

Dr Baldev Raj is a highly distinguished metallurgist and nuclear scientist. He was till recently the Director of Indira Gandhi Centre for Advanced Research of the Department of Atomic Energy at Kalpakkam. He is the current President of the prestigious Indian National Academy of Engineering and has a very large number of research publications to his credit and has been honoured by many countries. He has also co-authored, “Where gods come alive: A monograph on the bronze icons of South India” (2000, Vigyan Prasar). Shivanand Kanavi met him at the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor facility, Kalpakkam recently and spoke to him about how he got to employ his considerable skills as a metallurgist in studying some objects from our ancient and medieval past and what we can learn from it.

How did you get interested in archaeo-metallurgy? When did it start?

It is a strange coincidence. Prof. C V Sundaram was our director at Indira Gandhi Centre for Advanced Research. There was a fellow of IISc, Dr Paramsivan, who did his PhD in archaeo-metallurgy six decades back! He came to C V Sundaram and said he was interested in the characterisation of bronzes. Prof Sundaram called me (it was the late seventies-early eighties) and said you are doing non-destructive testing, why don’t you work with Prof Paramsivan? I said yes. We then went to the south Indian temples where the bronzes are, and also went to museums which gave us permission to bring them to the lab. The very first results were welcomed and appreciated. Dr V S Arunachalam was the scientific advisor to Raksha Mantri (Defence Minister) at the time and had keen interest in that. He was encouraging and said that good science should be done and that just saying that we have a great heritage does not help. That was the trigger point. Then I got interested in the iron pillar, I got interested in icons, in the temple at Mahabalipuram, and so on. Now I am interested in the characterisation of Ajanta and Ellora using Raman spectroscopy. We also studied the musical pillars of Madurai, which appeared in the cover of the Accoustic Journal of the USA. Now I am as interested in archaeo-metallurgy as nuclear metallurgy.

SK: To begin with, can you explain what is archaeo-metallurgy and why it is important?

BR: Those metal objects were made a long time back, maybe 2000 years or 700 years or 200 years ago.
The very conceptualisation of those objects happened with the knowledge base of that time, and the inspiration was even greater than the knowledge base. Today there may be a much greater knowledge base, but how many things are done with that kind of inspiration? Only such things stand the test of time. We get the knowledge of technology of that time from the scriptures but everything is not mentioned. It is a broad description. They had mastered the technology without the characterisation tools or modelling. So, archaeo-metallurgy is digging into the past metallurgy through reverse engineering. It is very fascinating.
When you still find gaps, you leave the hypotheses open. Sometimes the historians, sometimes the experts in arts, bridge the gap but you provide them the component of S&T (Science & Technology). It becomes useful to them also. In India fortunately there are a number of artefacts for archaeo-metallurgy. In fact one needs to broaden metallurgy to include materials science. Then you cover almost everything — stone, paintings and so on.

SK: In terms of Indian heritage there is a lot of ignorance and, because of colonisation, an inferiority complex also. One tends to think that Europe produced everything. This type of scientific research into our past which describes complex technologies being employed in ancient and medieval India changes that perception.

BR: Earlier nobody was interested in India but today people take you seriously. Of course nobody is interested in hearing claims which have epics as the basis. But if you can use scientific methods then people in the outside world listen. Then even the enlightened tourists would be interested. Take Yoga for example. Because a lot of serious people took up writing, teaching, popularising Yoga (and a few might have misused it also) it enhanced the position of Yoga internationally. Even our work on a scientific basis of Indian science and technology would lift the reputation of India from a low cost centre of cheap manufacture to a people who are capable of innovative and inspirational work. One can then have a robust story to engage the rest of the world with confidence. Even when we studied the south Indian bronzes it was from that point of view.

SK: What did you learn and conclude from that? What got you interested in the south Indian bronzes?

BR: One factor was beauty. The artists were involved in producing more than the daily necessities. How could they produce something which was so inspirational? Bronze technology was mature but nobody had produced such aesthetic objects. They were inspired by the scriptures. Castings at that time were made using bee wax but how did they give them such perfect shape and shine? I think they probably did not realise at that time that they were creating something almost perfect. Material was also not very abundant at that time — they had to re-melt when things went wrong. But if they created something beautiful they incarnated it and installed it in a temple. When I studied the bronzes, I found that they had very few defects whereas even in today’s 21st century investment casting there are so many defects in small pieces! The conclusion I drew is that there are certain things in human creation which come by commitment, which do not come from the technology or machines you use!
They were inspired by the fact that they were creating images of god, and second was the fear of the king who had commissioned the work. In the process they created perfection. They did not even have ways to check for defects that we have. The products were an unparalleled combination of beauty and technology. We have compared with many other things of that time in the world.

SK: What did you learn from the study of the Iron pillar?

BR: Nowadays we are talking about cost effective technology and actually the iron pillar is one such example. It is ordinary iron of no fancy alloy composition, but it has survived 2000 years! That is great science. The anti-corrosion property has been studied well. It is primarily because of the phosphide layer, which regenerates in a few months even if you remove it.

SK: It is said that during Alexander’s time India had steel technology.

BR: Yes, Wootz steel.

SK: Have they figured out how Wootz steel was produced?

BR: We have figured out its micro structure but not been able to reverse engineer it.

SK: Has enough field work been done to find any people with memories of these technologies?

BR: In the case of south Indian bronzes it has been done. The last of the persons who actually knew of it passed away a few years back. Fortunately, we recorded his interview with photographs etc. Dr Sharada Srinivasan and Prof S Ranganathan have done considerable work on Wootz steel.

SK: In building the story of Indian science and technology people have largely depended on epics and the Puranas etc., which many Indians also may not believe, but the material artefacts are indisputable. What we can reconstruct forensically from them would be sound and verifiable.

BR: Yes it would be verifiable by any country. Science has to withstand questions and has to be verifiable by anyone independently. If more and more people take this up as a hobby, it will bring them closer to their civilisation and culture also.
Today when we talk of being global, it sounds very vague. Nobody knows what that means. This kind of work would bind them to their culture and also look at global possibilities. I think this should be taken up by more and more good people as a hobby. Not that one should set up a big lab for archaeo-metallurgy. Every lab can do it wherever there is interest and specialists. Take the Taj Mahal for example, one can do a lot there from the archaeo materials point of view. It has been explored to a great extent from the point of view of architecture. For example, if I ask the question, what is the remaining life of the Taj, what is the answer? Are we expecting it to stand till eternity? Why can’t we explore it? We will learn along the way. We need to put together a small group of 10-20 people comprising civil engineers, material scientists, experts in characterisation etc. That kind of work would attract the attention of anybody in the world!

SK: When I first visited the Taj Mahal what struck me was not its beauty but the technology involved in it. The minarets are conical. The angle of the cone is so small that only when you look at it from far do you notice it. So how did they machine the marble which has been kept in C-sections which are cylindrical but also have a small conical slope? This has been done with such high accuracy that each one sits perfectly on the next one. Obviously this cannot be done by hand burnishing. So what kind of machining did they do to those marbles? Moreover it is over 300 years old. In the period since then there must have been several serious seismic shocks, then how has this structure with-stood it? How did they earthquake proof it?

BR: One should study its foundation, using non-destructive testing methods. Also during seismic events one can measure the vibrations and calculate in reverse and estimate what kind of foundation it must be sitting on. There are a whole lot of issues.

SK: When I visited some caves in Maharashtra in Lonavala, in Ajanta, in Sahyadris or even in Mumbai in Mahakali, Jogeshwari or Elephanta etc.- I had many questions. Some of them were built 1500 years ago in the Satavahana period. I have always wondered how they cut the hard rock. What kind of metallic tools were used? I have asked archaeologists but have not got answers. Similarly, how was the Kailash temple at Ellora built from a monolith? What kind of project management and planning did they do to achieve the outcome?

BR: There are a lot of questions. It is very exciting and one does not know the answers. One has to spend quite a bit of time and research in a step by step manner to get plausible answers.

SK: Thank you Dr Baldev Raj. This has been a very stimulating conversation.

Book Review: Reinventing India--R A Mashelkar

2011-09-19T21:45:00.000+05:30

Business India, Oct 2, 2011

Managing Brand India

Shivanand Kanavi

Reinventing India- Raghunath Mashelkar, Sahyadri Prakashan, Pune, 2011

Sa'id al-Andalusi, a leading natural philosopher of theeleventh century Spain, which was then under Arab rule, wrote in 1068 CE, in his“Kitab Tabaqat al-'Umam”, (See “Science in the Medieval World—Book of theCategories of Nations”, By Said Al-Andalusi, English Translation: Sema`an I.Salem, Alok Kumar, University of Texas Press, 1991) about the contributions toscience of all known nations.

He said, “The first nation (to have cultivated science) isIndia. This is a powerful nation having a large population, and a rich kingdom(possession). India is known for the wisdom of its people. Over many centuries,all the kings of the past have recognized the ability of the Indians in all thebranches of knowledge.”

Further, “The kings of China have stated that the kings ofthe world are five in number and all the people of the world are theirsubjects. They mentioned the king of China, the king of India, the king of theTurks, the king of the Furs (Persians) and the king of the Romans. They referredto the king of China as the ‘king of humans’ because the people of China aremore obedient to authority and are stronger followers of government policiesthan all the other peoples of the world. They referred to the king of India asthe ‘king of wisdom’ because of the Indians’ careful treatment of ulum(sciences) and their advancement in all the branches of knowledge”. Science (ulum),as used by Sa'id and other scholars of that period, is a broad term coveringvirtually all aspects of human knowledge.

The point to be noted in the above quotation is not on Indiabeing “the first nation to cultivate science.” It is on the fact that Europeanscholars, as late as the eleventh-century, thought India as a leader in scienceand technology.

Eight hundred years later, Thomas Babington Macaulay in hisinfamous minute on Indian education, said “who could deny that a single shelfof a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India”!

However violently one might disagree with this assessment, itis a fact that India was not looked upon as a source of science, technology andinnovation by the rest of the world during and immediately after the colonialperiod. Clearly from an innovator and leader, India had fallen far behind andbecome a receiver and a me-too in the advancement of science and technology.

In the 70s and 80s we were all brought up on a steady dietof “import substitution”, reverse engineering, “adapting advanced technology tothe needs of the developing world” ad nauseam.

How it is then, in the 21^st century, thesituation seems to have changed in global perception? Today as Mashelkar pointsout in his collection of writings and speeches, “Reinventing India”, India is avery important part of the global knowledge network. Indian researchers arebeing sought after by global corporations.

Considerable amount of Indian talent migrated to NorthAmerica and Europe in the 60s and 70s, filling the ranks of: NASA; Bell Labs; SiliconValley; National Institutes of Health and the global health care system andpharmaceutical industry; Wall Street and of course global academia. However,today at the last count by Mashelkar, 760 global companies had set up theirR&D establishments in India employing over 160,000 Indian researchers. Totop it all, recently the Financial Times spoke about India as a hub ofmanufacturing driven by its own “Frugal Engineering” (see ‘The New Trade Routes’,Friday, May 20, 2011, FT Special Reports) signifying that a new culture ininnovative science and technology is percolating to the shop floor and marketplace as well.

This is a remarkable re-emergence of India in the globalknowledge networks.

Mashelkar’s book chronicles this re-emergence; cheer leadsit; brands it and markets it, in an inspirational way, like nobody else could.Anybody who has heard him speak on the subject finds the evangelist in himcompelling, irresistible and motivational. Even die hard sceptics andnaysayers, of which we have a plenty in India, will find narration of his ownlife’s journey from the poverty stricken chawls of Mumbai to the pinnacles of R&Dmanagement and policy making, hard to resist.

Many readers might find several themes repeated or oftenrecycled with a new spin in his speeches and articles collected here. But acardinal mantra of brand building is, ‘spell out the differentiator of thebrand clearly and hammer it repeatedly and relentlessly in all your internaland external messaging’. Mashelkar does it to a ‘t’.

One blemish in the otherwise well produced book is poor copyediting. For example, on page 8, a sentence, “24 July 1995 marks the day onwhich India started to reinvent itself” appears as a separate paragraph with noconnection to the previous one or the subsequent one, puzzling the reader aboutits significance.

Many of Mashelkar’s messages regarding India having thepotential to become a platform for global R&D, have become passé in the 21^stcentury. The world has recognised the worth of Indian talent. And Indian talenthas recognised the worth of its ideas in the market place. However, it shouldbe remembered that Mashelkar stood out alone as an articulate dreamer andinspiring speaker in the uncertain ‘90s.

Today the geo-political discourse has changed from ‘potentialof India’ to the ‘rise of India’. Of course, one would still consider Obama’sremark that India has ‘already emerged’ as an American excess. In the ‘90s,Mashelkar looked amazingly naïve but uplifting but today his messages are agiven. Hence the ideas in “Reinventing India” are worth going over againkeeping the dates and context in mind.

Bridging the Digital Divide in India

2011-09-11T20:29:00.000+05:30

http://reflections-shivanand.blogspot.com/2011/09/bridging-digital-divide-in-india.html

Excerpts from an hour longprogramme on Lok Sabha TV on bridging the digital divide in India, where yourstruly was invited.

Head Start Lok Sabha TV

Nov 10, 2009

“Bridging the Digital Divide”

Panel discussion Participants- Shivanand Kanavi andDinesh Sharma

Host: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Paranjoy- Indiaentered the new millennium with 1/3^rd of the world’s computersoftware engineers and 1/4^th of the world’s poor. Can we bridge thisdigital divide? Can IT benefit the poor and underprivileged in this country?Let me welcome the guests.

I have here with me Shivanand Kanavi,a theoretical physicist from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and thenstudied in Boston; moved from a teaching and academic career into economicconsultancy and then to journalism and then to back to corporate sector andcurrently Vice President, Special Projects at Tata Consultancy Services aleading company of its kind in the country and author of a recently publishedbook Sand to Silicon. We also have Dinesh Sharma, Science Editor of Mail Todayhas spent 25 years in the profession and author of the book, The LongRevolution-the birth and growth of India’s Information Technology Industry.

Let us start the discussion onto what extent IT has affected the life of the aam admi of this country?

Shivanand- To look at that lets first look at the basicfeatures that information technology has, the first thing is that informationtechnology has in certain areas increased human reach, human powers, we can gointo that in which way and so on later. Second thing is it has helped in cooperativebehaviours, collaborating / sharing things with others and communication so onso forth, which all goes into co-operative, networked behaviours. The thirdthing is as it creates a direct channel in a sense of communication betweenvarious individuals there is a sort of delayering and disintermediation.

Paranjoy:Explain what you mean by that…

Shivanand: Itis very similar to what a Bhakti movement did when it said that let there bedirect communication with God, why do we need go-betweens who can act as gatekeepers.

In every transaction in our society,with government or with other individuals there are so many middle men. Thesemiddle men can not only add to the cost and time for a transaction to takeplace but also make life very asymmetrical and miserable for a citizen. Youhave a culture in India, since several thousand years, at least going back asfar as Chanakya, where the state is supposed to do so many things. It is partof its Rajadharma to do so many things for its citizens. Now if there are somany middlemen in those services then a state becomes a highly oppressive instrument,it doesn’t matter what the stated policy is. So if technology can help inremoving those middlemen and making things easier and faster for citizens, thenstraight away everybody from poor to the middle class and rich will benefit, a lotof transactions and services can be smoothened out.

Paranjoy - Shivanand has given a somewhat philosophicalanswer to the question. May be you can give some examples

Dinesh: Youreferred to the number of software engineers India produces and no of poorpeople we have that is the digital divide. On one hand we have a generationwhich is major user of all the digital devices and on the other hand we havemillions of people who have no access to them. Even before this whole conceptof digital divide and digital technology came, India did some experiments whichproved to be hugely successful; one of them was computerised railwayreservation that remains to my knowledge the largest application of informationtechnology, anywhere in the world till today. It’s not the question of somebodyusing a computer or a mobile phone; it’s a question of how technology istouching someone’s life. That is the technology diffusion that has taken place.Today 17 million people travel by Indian Railways every day, so it is touchingthe life of 17 million lives everyday. All three of us belong to a generationof long queues, one train, and one window. You could not book onward journey orreturn journey, you had to send telegrams. The amount of time someone spentbuying a railway ticket was almost equivalent to amount of time you travel bythe train, so the change from then to now is amazing. This process has startedin 1984 and it continued till 1999, 2005 it was connected to Internet. So itremains to be the largest technology diffusion project of its kind till date.Imagine 6 billion people travelling by train every year in India, so it istouching the life of that many people.

As Shivanand said it has cutdown the cost, it has cut down the transaction time; it has cut down the intermediaries.The other example is of course banking, it used to take 6 days or even morethan that for a local cheque to clear, 6 weeks for an outstation cheque to clear,so all that has changed. The technology has changed the way services are offered.

Paranjoy - Whatreally changed in the mindset of employees who opposed the use computers inBanks?

Shivanand -There are several things involved in it, first of all you need the motivationin the top leadership to actually implement a programme like this and communicatewith the employees and to all the stakeholders the benefits of this to thebanks and their customers. The employees have the stakes in the growth of thebanks, its survival, profitability etc and as well as their own personal growth.Of course they have to assure them of job security which is the first thing youwould have to ensure. In India no project has been done successfully withoutthe implementer assuring the employee the jobs are safe. But then there issomething more than that, you are learning new skills. You are moving into adifferent level of skills and technology and ability to do many more thingsthan you used to do before.

Paranjoy - Dineshdo you agree with Shivanand?

Dinesh -In any new technology project or introduction of new concept we do need a championat the top be it political leadership, be it a champion within an organisation,so certainly agree with him. Again go back to the railways why there wasopposition in banking and why there was no opposition in Railways , the reasonbehind this is the decision to computerise banking operations was taken at acertain level and it was implemented inthat way. The process of Railways computerisation started with the involvementof the employees, because the process itself was so complex. For example, therewere 200 categories of tickets and umpteen numbers of coaches and one had tounderstand that. The company given the project was CMC. They had to sit andspend time to understand from Railways clerks for hours and days together, andmake them a partner in the whole process.

Paranjoy - Shivanand, let us talk about the experiences ofsay computerisation of land records in some of the southern states likeKarnataka, where I understand it has been done very well.

Shivanand -I am not that familiar with this project though I know some of the features ofit, probably Dinesh can talk about it in detail. But I can tell you little bitabout another project that is currently sweeping India and has created a safetynet by the government for rural poor; that is NREGS. The whole question onrural development programmes and poverty alleviation programmes has been likewhat is the leakage through corruption? Does it reach the right people and haveany productive assets been created?

Paranjoy -How has computerisation helped in National Rural Employment Guaranty Programme?

Shivanand - Oneexample is NREGS in Andhra Pradesh. One more general point I want to make is:in these kinds of software projects, there is no a software package which is available,a readymade solution in answer to XYZ requirements. Human beings, procedures,and legacy issues all these need to be dealt with. It’s not even just automatingwhat exists. What exists can be highly anachronistic, because we have as legacyessentially colonial state machinery; its procedures, rules and so on designedin the 19^th century! So it may not be desirable to automate it. Soyou need to do what is called re-engineering. It would mean the deepinvolvement of the administration at all levels, at the Panchayat level or theMandal Panchayat level; who is going to enter the data; how he is going toevaluate a project; how he would evaluate the progress in the project and how willhe differentiate between say digging in soft soil and a rocky area, when thetwo are very different. All these nitty-gritties have to be configured intoyour system. So it has to be a co-developed system. It’s not something which asoftware company has readymade. For example, Dinesh discussed how the railwayswere involved in the computerisation. There were so many complexities. At theend of the day, once you do a successful project in India you can do anythinganywhere in the world!

Paranjoy:Let me raise another issue. Even if there are some success stories why are wenot able to replicate that success elsewhere?

Dinesh - Afew years back a survey was done on all kinds of ICT or eGovernanace projectsthat are going on in the country. At that time the count was 300 or so and theywere in different pockets, like Bhoomi in the whole of Karnataka, Friends inKerala, others in AP, Tamil Nadu and North. It was found in that survey only15% of them have been successful in their objective, 35% partially failed. Sothat was the kind of assessment of these projects. The problem is for anyeGovernanace or citizen interface government project to succeed, we need threethings: First willingness to reform, because you are bringing a new system,there is no point in computerising existing forms and putting them on the web,that is not e-governance, that is not going to solve the problem and it mighteven complicate it. So there should be willingness to reform the existingsystem without that e-governance cannot succeed. Second is availability oftechnology, you might need to develop software, you need to have a hardwareparticularly designed for that project and so on for example, in Bhoomi theytried Bio-metric technology for first time on such a large scale since many cannotenter a password. The data, Land records should be available only to certainpeople and their bio metric data was needed. This technology was speciallydeveloped for Bhoomi project. So the availability of hardware, software andtechnology is needed to execute these projects.

Paranjoy - Whatis preventing us from scaling up such successful projects? Why are others notrepeating it? Is it lack of political will or resources?

Shivanand - Asfar as resources are concerned I don’t think that is a constraint now, especiallywith the kind of 8%-9% growth we have been seeing, the Government should haveenough resources to implement large projects. But as you said even though it isa cliché that ‘political will is required’ it definitely plays a major role ingovernment projects and especially when the project deals with systems wherethere is scope for corruption. For example, in Andhra Pradesh there wasgovernment tendering and procurement, when that was IT enabled; put on the webwith no complicated tendering process; e-auction, reverse auction etc then therewas a serious campaign in certain sections of the media against it and againstthe political leadership. So things can get politicised immediately becausethere are vested interest involved

Paranjoy -So media was acting on behalf of those vested interests?

Shivanand -Some sections yes. As you know in many areas media houses are controlled by Politians.So there were serious allegations and slander and all kinds of things going on.But in the face of all this resistance, when the government went ahead, therewas advancement. Another important thing is the transparency that Information Technologyhas brought in, which has prevented excuses like, “we cannot locate the file”etc.

Dinesh - Onepoint I wanted to add on why it succeeds in one place and not in another. It dependsa lot on the capacity of the administrative machinery to manage and absorb thechange. The states which have very good administration, I would put most of thesouthern states in the category, are also leaders in the good deployment of e-governance

Paranjoy - Vestedinterests has also become a cliché. Who are these vested interests? How canthey be eliminated?

Dinesh - Vestedinterests can vary from project to project. Suppose a municipal body like BMC orMCD wants to put up a list of illegal constructions in Delhi or in any othercity location wise, which is a simple transparency measure that any municipalbody can take. But no municipal authority has been able to do that because of vestedinterests of councillors, MLAs or politicians or even big industries. So there arewasted interests depending on project to project

Shivanand -I will give you another example: the very simple case of garbage collection in Mumbai.The population in Mumbai produces thousands of tons of garbage everyday nowthere are close to 2000 garbage trucks which are involved in it and a lot ofthem belong to private contractors. Despite all these systems you find garbagelying in all kinds of places and citizen complaints. So when it wasinvestigated it was found that there are many contractors who never did thosetrips but collected money from Municipal Corporation. So how are you going totrack these trucks. There was a solution which was implemented using GPSsystem- Geographical Positioning System. That can really track the truck, whichroute it has taken, how much time it has taken, how many times it has gonearound etc.

Dinesh - Thesame technology was also proposed to FCI – Food Corporation of India truckswhich supply food grains to the pubic distribution system. When trucks go outof FCI godowns, you can simply track them with GPS, however it was never allowedto work!

Paranjoy –Itis easier to pay bills, book tickets on the Internet etc., however technology isstill impacting a very small number of people. Is that correct?

Shivanand -Yes, but at the same time the numbers of beneficiaries is increasing and it isincreasing at a very healthy rate, I would say. Even though India has had computersand software engineers for more than 50 years, it is only in the last 10 to 15years that widespread adoption of this technology is happening in our society, particularlywith respect to government, markets, financial services sector, in bankingsector etc. So today we have what Gunnar Myrdal once called ‘the revolution of risingexpectations’. We can’t even imagine today the earlier situation! For example, beforecomputerised stock trading came into the picture back in 1994, how were thestock exchanges operating? There were cases of fraud, there was no transparencybut today we want higher and higher transparency, and all kinds of mechanismsto prevent frauds, bring in as many new people as investors and brokers, makeit easier, make it more accessible to even small towns and so on so forththrough VSAT and satellite technology, otherwise a few brokers used to controlentire stock trading and all this has happened in less than 15 years

Paranjoy – Wehave 3 computers per hundred population and US has one out of two. There issuch a low level of Internet penetration. Don’t you think Dinesh the use oftechnology has not benefited common man as it should have? There is a cleardigital divide.

Dinesh -When we talk of digital technology let’s not get fixated with computers; theconcept of personal computers cannot be applied to India. Here computer is notpersonal that is why the whole concept of kiosks came in, where you don’t needto own a computer but still you can get benefitted by a service that is being offeredthrough internet or a use of computer. I don’t think we need to replicate thewestern model of one computer per child. Let’s move away from that. Because wehave 450 million mobile phones today and the power of at least 100 million ofthem is as good or much better than your computer. So what we need areapplications that run on these mobile phones. It’s not just for voice ortexting but we need more and more applications on mobile rather than getting fixatedwith computers.

Paranjoy -Can we expedite the process of IT usage?

Dinesh -We have moved very slowly, there are many projects which are moving veryslowly. Everything is not what we would like it to be but compare that to whathas happened in NREGS where they are issuing smart cards, money is gettingtransferred to their account etc. The difference is that many projects have todeal with legacy systems and procedures which we have been working from past100 years. It’s very difficult to change the legacy system. It involves boththe mindset and processes involved. For example you need a signature, an emblemetc. all that can be solved. Technology has a solution for everything and youcan get as good a birth certificate as you would normally get as a handwritten certificate.But it’s a question of how do you change a mindset and how do you change thoselegacy processes in the system, that is the biggest challenge

Paranjoy – Wherehave been successful in coping with the past, the legacy Shivanand?

Shivanand -Any large system, affecting a lot of people, employees as well as citizens is areal life exercise in change management, for example take the State Bank of India.I mentioned that because SBI is probably the largest bank in the world, interms of number of branches--with its associate banks it has close to 14000 brancheswhere as the largest banking group in the world is Citi Bank and Citi Bank hasall over the world less than 3000 branches! So when you need to connectbranches for anytime banking and anywhere banking and not just going to aparticular branch and opening those ledgers, then you need to create a single centraldatabase and connect all the branches to it, all the ATMs to it and so on soforth. One could be in Ladakh, or backwaters of Kerala on a boat etc but oneshould be able to access one’s account. Dinesh already mentioned the Railway Passengerreservation system, see now what is happening in India Post.

Paranjoy - Wouldyou like to talk about telemedicine, Dinesh?

Dinesh -when we talk about the application of digital technology that’s where we canbridge the digital divide like you have a combination of internet put it withsatellite technology and some add on hardware on both the side specificallydeveloped for that project and then you can have a very nice telemedicine project.Kerala has been successful; again they all are in pilot scale. There by you areable to solve a problem of connecting a specialist as well as doctors in ruralareas. Not only in consulting but even follow-up. For example, somebody comesto AIIMs for surgery he needs to follow it up after 15 days to 2 weeks or 3weeks he has to make 3-4 visits to AIIMS only for that, so surgery can be doneat AIIMS but the follow up can be done where the person is throughtelemedicine. Telemedicine has undergone a whole lot of change now you have videoconferencing facilities, you can connect anybody to anybody. We need slightchanges in systems and we can work on that. This has been demonstrated already.For example, in Rajasthan in Indira Gandhi Canal area, where malaria is on therise, where there are very few testing labs. So samples have to travel fromonce place to another and it takes 2-3 days. Now there is a technology whereyou can do the diagnosis there itself and convey the results or an x-ray can betaken and sent through a mobile phone the images can be transferred toradiologists in the city. So these all are simple applications but we need towork on that. Again hospitals are legacy systems, how do you change them? Thatis the biggest challenge. You cannot have telemedicine centre working on itsown it has to be integrated with existing healthcare system

Paranjoy – Shivananddo you want to add to that?

Shivanand:Yes. I want to add another aspect of healthcare i.e. healthcare management andnot just telemedicine based consultation. How do you network the hospitals, howdo you create a database of patients? A positive example in this regards is theArogya Shree scheme in AP. Literally millions of people below poverty line are coveredby it. A person who has a serious medical problem goes to a nearby project centreand shows his card and through the IT system they can find out which hospital isthe best to deal with this and where beds are available etc. They are justusing a keyboard and mouse to do this. Instead of running from pillar to post,paying the bill and trying to recover it through reimbursement, all this isjust a cashless transaction. So that’s a success. So I think using IT to makeefficient public health is also important.

Paranjoy -How can information technology help the poor from our society?

Shivanand -With all this technology we are still trying to provide services and include inthe economic growth about 200 to 300 million of our population. IT is helpingin including these by breaking the silos and letting services flow fromgovernment to citizens as well as creating some cooperative networks amongstthese 200 to 300 million people. This is a huge challenge, because 300 millionis entire population of United States!

Technology will not address onits own how the rest, 700 or 800 million people can be added to this inclusivegrowth. That’s why you see a chunky growth, certain sectors would advance fastdespite the fact that the roads are bad etc. Telecom is a classic example, nobodyenvisaged 10-15 years back that 500 million mobile phones would be there inIndia and today we have them and all kinds of people are using them. If the 450to 500 million figure is correct, then nearly half the population has mobilephones and that is obviously an advance in technology application despite badroads, and education and the whole social sector being poor. Including 700-800million people is a much deeper question, which has to do with the structure ofour economy, I don’t think information technology can address that. IT can helpin managing certain things for eg- I remember a well-known politician asking in2001, “Yeh IT, YT kya hai?” He said if there is drought how IT is going tobring rain. The answer is, IT can help you in drought management and reliefmanagement, it cannot bring rains, it cannot fundamentally improve agriculturein that sense. After all, IT is information technology so it can give youinformation.

Dinesh -I feel the growth we have achieved here is lop-sided. We have been talkingabout 450 million mobile phones but that could be in just 2-3 metros and otherdeveloped areas. So I would still say this growth is lop sided, there areseveral hundred villages in India without a village telephone at all. So thereis a certain obligation. We have the Universal Service Obligation fund, whichhas been created which not been spent, so government is still to do its partsince money is coming from private operators so the growth is lop-sided whetherits mobile telephony, whether its services reaching out to the people for eg-Bhoomi is useless for landless labour, what record it’s going to find? Ofcourse IT has touched lives of several millions of people but still there arelot of people which are not included in this. So we need to look at innovative approaches,innovative applications of different forms technology which are available. Oneexample I gave was of healthcare sector if there is phone with village levelworker she can collate all the data and data can travel faster to nearesthealthcare centre and health care can reach the village. There are severalapplications like that. For example, you don’t need to send your soil fortesting in agriculture centre in district, there are sensors which you can putin the soil which don’t cost much and data can be transported through themobile phone. Then you can know how much fertilizer you should apply, there areapplications like that which are not very costly

Paranjoy - Wouldinternet on mobile or 3G impact lives of people?

Shivanand -I think yes. Broadband is going to provide rich content to reach people and in noway landlines or cables are going to provide that. The broadband has to comewirelessly. So any new development, whether it is 3G whether it is WiMax or 4G,all these new technologies are coming. Whichever proves affordable andreplicable on large scale is going to make a big difference.

Another example which I wantedto give you is a technology application that can include many more people whoare not yet in this 300 million. It is a technology for literacy, which wasdeveloped with a lot of inputs from linguists, psychologists and computerscientists. It is called a Computer Based Functional Literacy module. It usesdiscarded computers. It does not need high powered computers and within 40hours it can teach an adult illiterate enough to help their children inhomework, people who could not read and write have been able to read newspapers and help their children in home work. The thing is to replicate it and theestimate is that within next 5 years we could make entire India functionallyliterate

Dinesh -People say that when we don’t have electricity in villages how people are goingto use computers so there are paddle powered computers. Innovations exist!

Paranjoy – Shivanandin your book Sand to Silicon you have written about Amar Bose, Sam Pitroda,Arun Netravali and literally dozens of eminent Indian technologists who havecontributed so much towards the growth of digital technology all over theworld. Do we see brain gain happening instead of brain drain with the diaspora?

Shivanand - Ithink it’s bound to happen and it has already happened in the last 15-20 yearsand there has been a great amount of interaction between Indians who are abroadand Indians working in India especially regarding digital technology orinformation technology. Fundamentally, these are not the days of Thomas AlvaEdison or Graham Bell, where one guy would sit in a lab and who could develop atechnology. Now any new technology goes through networks of thousands of peopleall over the world so you can’t even call it Indian technology or American technologyor Chinese technology. People have to collaborate and that is the reason thatyou have so many companies where their front end is in Silicon Valley with theirR&D being done in India and similarly there are Indian companies which aremaking use of the research being done elsewhere whether it is pharma industryor digital technology industry, information technology industry. These changesin the world have led a kind of circulation of ideas and what Tom Friedman calledthe Flat world, at least in this field.

Paranjoy – Welive in a highly unequal world so are we seeing the world really becoming flat?Or was Mr Thomas Friedman engaging in hyperbole, to put it mildly.

Dinesh -Mr. Friedman was looking at the way the technology has flattened the deliveryof services like you buy a MacDonald’s burger in Los Angles and the back officeprocessing taking place in Egypt or somewhere else. In that sense he gave theidiom of the world is getting flat.

Paranjoy: Butare we becoming a nation of cyber coolies with body shopping or knowledgeworkers? Of course I am using exaggerated expressions.

Dinesh: Thereis no doubt that we have good base of knowledge workers and all the largecorporations including big companies like TCS who themselves are a MNC, areseeking knowledge workers wherever they are. Companies and people would gowherever there is a comparative advantage in terms of talent which has become avery important resource and in that sense the world has become flat. We have anadvantage of numbers and we have to see how we can add that to our economicgrowth

Shivanand - Inthe world of knowledge, in the world of technology, I think the world hasbecome flat and not in other aspects. If you are comparing farmers in Tanjavoorand farmers in California or in Canada then it is not flat. However the point Iam making is Satyen Bose had to write a letter to Einstein and wait for monthstogether for a reply when he had worked out a new statistics for photons and thatis not necessary in today’s world.

Paranjoy: Nowit can be done in a fraction of a second through email. I get your point. Wehave run of time. Thanks Shivanand and Dinesh for coming to our studios andsharing your views. The consensus is IT has changed in some ways the lives ofordinary Indians but surely it can do very much more. Thank you very much.

Arun Netravali: Father of HDTV

2011-08-07T21:02:00.000+05:30

Matunga to Murray Hills

ARUN NETRAVALI, (President-Bell Labs, CTO- Lucent)

Shivanand Kanavi

Business India, January 22, February 4, 2001

Arun Netravali was a very busy man when we tried to meet him in Murray Hills, the headquarters of famed Bell Labs. He kept changing the appointment. Finally, we had to do a telephonic interview. He was definitely keen to meet us, but probably other corporate priorities came in the way. The temporary woes of Lucent; falling revenues, bad debts to networks, falling stock price, which has taken a massive 80 percent erosion in the last nine months; all of which finally led to the CEO being sacked in late October, might have kept Netravali busy at Lucent.

We missed an opportunity to have a spin around the famed Bell Labs, where one is said to run into a Nobel Laureate in every corridor. Handling all this talent and channelising some of their energy into commercially useful directions is obviously a challenge for its President, Arun Netravali. Bell Labs has been the mother of several inventions in fibre optics, telecommunications, computer languages, lasers and, of course, semiconductors, including the transistor. But largely, others have reaped the benefits of inventions in Bell Labs, as in the case of Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), owned by Xerox on the West Coast.

Amidst the current boom in networking startups, mergers and acquisitions, Lucent has had a dubious distinction. It has been a nursery for many ideas, which come to fruition outside of it and when it acquires companies it is unable to retain a large percentage of key personnel from the acquired companies. Thus, Netravali and his colleagues have their work cut out.

When we asked him about optical networking and its prospects he said: "There is no question, optical is the technology of choice for long-distance communications. Today, the same fibre is carrying a larger number of bytes. Similarly, in the metro segment optical is quite established. At an enterprise level or backbone level, there is an increasing use of fibre. What has multiple possibilities is the access network. Fast optoelectronic switches and routers have to be used, since there is no optical logic or memories still. Till then, pure optical networks cannot become a reality. So, hybrid technologies are being used. What we have now are lambda routers which do not route individual packets but entire wavelengths."

Netravali does not deny the fact that there is a slow-down in the economy, which is affecting all corporations. "But it is far less than what is made out. As far as telecom spending goes, several CLECS which came as competitors to local phone carriers have suffered revenue losses or have gone down, but ILECS involved in long distance are ordering new equipment," he says. He agrees with Desh Deshpande of Sycamore that in the crunch time there is an acceleration in switching to new technologies, since you want a bigger bang with the same buck.

He warms up when you talk about video compression in which he has several patents and research papers. Netravali led the work in establishing MPEG standards and the HDTV initiative. "High Definition TV could not take off due to several reasons, one of them being the high cost of the tube and not enough investments in research worldwide. But I think it will make a comeback with convergence. Instead of TVs, you will have computer screens giving you HD pictures, once enough bandwidth becomes available," he says.

Born in a small town, Ankola in Karnataka, Netravali grew up in Matunga, Mumbai. After five years in a municipal school, he joined King George High School and later Elphinstone College. After a brilliant career in IIT Bombay, where he graduated with a BTech in Electrical Engineering in 1967, Netravali went to Rice University, Houston for his PhD. After his graduate school, he joined NASA for two years before he landed up in the Mecca of research, Bell Labs, in 1972. Since then he has steadily risen to now become its president.

To Arun family still comes first. He loves tennis and travel, but "my priority is spending time with my family," he emphasises. Arun Netravali holds over 60 patents in the areas of computer networks, human interfaces to machines, picture processing and digital television. He has been an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also served on the editorial board of the IEEE, and is currently an editor of several journals.

Netravali's is an impressive story of a journey from the impoverished municipal schools of Mumbai to the highest levels of engineering research.

**********

From Sand to Silicon: The amazing story of digital technology—By Shivanand Kanavi, Tata-McGrawHill (2004), Rupa &Co (2006)

(See: http://reflections-shivanand.blogspot.com/2010/01/sand-to-silicon-by-shivanand-kanavi_22.html )

Pages 106-108 from Rupa & Co 2006 Edn

Netravali, currently chief scientist at Lucent Technologies, contributed enormously to digital video in the 1970s and 1980s. His work in video is widely recognised and used in media like DVD, video streaming and digital satellite TV. “In the 1970s and 1980s we had all the algorithms we needed, but the electronics we had was not fast enough to implement them,” says Netravali. Then the microchip brought a sea change. It is good to see some of the technologies we worked on get commercialised.” The Indian government honoured Netravali in 2001 with a Padma Bhushan, and the US government also in 2001, with the National Technology Award—the highest honour for a technologist in America.

Is compression a modern concept? No. That is how people have packed their baggage for centuries. Even your grandmother would say, “Keep the essentials and don’t leave any free space.”

WHAT PEOPLE WANT

This is not a politically correct sequel to Mel Gibson’s movie, What Women Want, but an example of how perceptual studies have advanced communications. Netravali and Jayant’s work is highly technical, but even laymen can understand some of the ideas used by them. They discovered that human perception, aural and visual, is remarkably inured to certain details. For example, Jayant and his team found that almost ninety per cent of the frequencies in high quality audio can be thrown away without affecting the audio quality, as perceived by listeners, because they get masked by the other ten per cent, and the human ear is none the wiser. This was great news for music companies, as they could now store hi-fi sound in a few megabytes of memory instead of a hundred megabytes.

Netravali also found that just applying coding algorithms would not provide enough compression to transmit full motion video. So he studied the physiology of the human eye and the cognitive powers of the viewer. What he found was this: if we are transmitting, say, the image of a person sitting on a lawn, then clearly we want good pictures of the person’s face and body but not necessarily the details of the grass. Our eye and brain are not interested in the grass.

Similarly, when we transmit a head-and-shoulders shot of a person in motion, the motion makes only a small difference from frame to frame. What we need to do is calculate the speed with which different parts of the body are moving and estimate their position in the next frame, then subtract it from the actual signal to be sent in the next frame and instead send only the difference along with the coding algorithm. If we can do that, then we can achieve a lot of compression. Jayant and Netravali did this. They also studied the reaction of the eye to different colours and used the knowledge in coding colour information. The key factor in their approach was the analysis of perception.

Najam Sethi, Pakistani journalist

2011-08-07T17:52:00.000+05:30

Apas ki Baat

The following are a few links to Najam Sethi's daily political talk show "Apas ki baat", in Urdu on GEO News, a mainstream TV news channel from Pakistan owned by the Jang Group.

His shows are an enticing mixture of irreverance, cool headed analysis (often contrarian to popular narratives), interesting political gossip, bold and provocative without ever being offensive.

I am yet to come across an equivalent of this in the much touted "free" main stream Indian media, which excels in screaming tabloid journalism but is complicit with the state's narrative on many important issues......

http://www.youtube.com/user/geotv#p/u/19/FNXVOsC_O4Q

http://www.youtube.com/user/geotv#p/u/18/SM2iBudvc6A

http://www.youtube.com/user/geotv#p/u/34/n7AfB4nMhAU
http://www.youtube.com/user/geotv#p/u/33/Tcio29NvWXI

India's New Fast Breeder Reactor

2011-06-13T15:20:00.002+05:30

http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-why-indias-fast-breeder-programme-is-cutting-edge/20110613.htm

At the PFBR site Kalpakkam

Why India's fast breeder programme is cutting edge

After three decades of hard work, India has reached the cutting edge of fast breeder technology. At Kalpakkam the site of the devastating tsunami of 2004 is coming up a 500 MW Fast Breeder Reactor at a furious pace says Shivanand Kanavi who visited it recently. It also happens to be the first tsunami ready reactor in India.

Fast breeders have entered journalistic and parliamentary lexicon during the parliamentary debates on the Indo-US nuclear deal. According to an apocryphal story, a venerable MP, dazed by the sudden influx of nuclear physics in the central hall of the Parliament, did not want to be left behind in the sound bite game and said, “We are good at fast breeders, that is how we became one billion strong”! Be that as it may, the fast breeder technology, in its essence, is more than 50 years old. Most people do not know that the first ever kilowatt of power from a nuclear reactor, anywhere in the world, came in 1951 from a fast breeder reactor, E B R-I (experimental breeder reactor) at Idaho Falls, USA.

So, what are these new-fangled objects, the fast breeder reactors? If we care to struggle with a little bit of nuclear physics, we might profit from it. Here are a few simple incentives to cross the knowledge hump.

The prototype fast breeder reactor under construction at a furious pace in Kalpakkam is scheduled to be commissioned in June 2012. According to S.C. Chetal, of Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), the two fast breeder reactors of 500 M W each, which are expected to come on stream in Kalpakkam by 2014, are being configured to produce power at the rate of Rs2.00 per unit (in today’s constant rupee terms). “We are doing our best to demonstrate that fast breeders are not only necessary for energy security but are also an economically viable technology for power production”, adds Chetal.

You want one more dollop of nuclear enthusiasm, then take this! “India’s total power production today is 1,10,000 M W. The potential power from the fast breeder cycle is 5,50,000 M W. This is a conservative estimate, the real optimists rate it as 8,00,000 M W. And all this without considering the imported Uranium available to India after the lifting of NSG sanctions in 2008”, says Baldev Raj, a leading metallurgist, who leads fast breeder research in India as director, IGCAR.
All this is not pulling a fast one on behalf of fast breeders, but a product of simple physics and arithmetic. In the power reactors currently in use at Rawatbhatta, (Rajasthan), Kalpakkam (TN), Narora (UP), Kakrapar (Gujarat), Kaiga (Karnataka) and Tarapur (Maharashtra), only 0.7 per cent of the fuel can be burnt to produce electricity.

That is because natural uranium mostly contains U238 and only 0.7 per cent of U235. It is only U235 that can be split using a slow neutron beam, producing enormous amounts of heat, to boil water, generate steam and run a turbine like in any other power station. Whereas U238 is not fissile, however, some of U238 converts itself into plutonium (Pu239), if exposed to fast neutrons. This new element, Pu239, can be easily burnt to produce power or to make nuclear weapons.

India invested, way back in the 1960s, in B A R C, to develop the technology to reprocess spent fuel rods from power reactors and extract plutonium from it. “ If we mix 25-30 per cent of plutonium with U238 and expose it to fast neutrons in a reactor, then plutonium will burn and give us about 20 times more power than the natural uranium reactors now in operation. Meanwhile, some of the U238 in the fuel would absorb some fast neutrons and get converted again into plutonium. Since roughly 1.1 kg of plutonium comes out of the spent fuel due to this conversion, for every 1 kg that was initially put in the fuel rod, such reactors are called breeder reactors. Since fast neutrons are used to trigger the chain reaction, such reactors are called fast breeder reactors,” explains Baldev Raj, who is also the current president of the prestigious Indian National Academy of Engineering.

Additionally, if we cover the reactor core with a blanket of either U238 or thorium, then this blanket captures some of the fast neutrons coming out of the core, which would have escaped and been wasted. On reprocessing this irradiated blanket, we could recover either Pu239 or U233. Thus originated Bhabha’s nuclear road map for India; to first master the natural uranium reactors, produce power, reprocess the spent fuel and recover plutonium from it. Burn this plutonium in fast breeder reactors produce more power. Reprocess the spent fuel and the blanket of U238 and thorium, obtain more Pu239 and U233. Burn the new U233, along with a mixture of thorium, in another set of power reactors and so on, achieving nirvana of electrical power.
As a scheme on paper, it was simply brilliant! It made use of the limited resources of Indian uranium did not get involved in the expensive uranium enrichment technology, as Iran is doing now. Instead, it used the expertise of nuclear chemists and chemical engineers to develop the plutonium recovery technology from spent fuel rods and invested in developing the fast breeder and the thorium technology.

However, two major hurdles confronted the plan. One, all those who were investigating the fast breeder technology, such as the US, the UK, Germany, France and Japan lost interest in it for various reasons. Firstly they had abundant supply of cheap uranium from Canada, Namibia, Niger and Australia; secondly, the US started actively discouraging it, since US feared that plutonium recovery technology would spread among a host of countries, when plutonium is the preferred bomb making material. Till recently, the US was successful in persuading other countries from developing fast breeder technology any further.

Russia and India are the only two countries, which have decided to continue on the path. Of course, with today’s nuclear renaissance, many countries want to revive their fast breeder programmes. Russia has a working fast breeder reactor B N600, and is engaged in now designing even more powerful fast breeder reactors. In India, the initial work on fast breeders started in early 1970s, at Kalpakkam, with a little help from France. However, after the peaceful nuclear explosion experiment, in 1974 (Pokhran-I), France withdrew all co-operation in nuclear technology and so did Canada, the US and the rest of the world.

Incidentally, one could utter ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’, an oxymoron if there was one, with a straight face, because no matter what the US, Canada, France, Russia, etc, say now, back in the 1960s and 1970s, the same word was very legit. According to data available up until 1988, 115 peaceful nuclear detonations were carried out, in what was once Soviet Union. These Nuclear explosions were used for the creation of water reservoirs, canals, mines and gas reservoirs, among other things. They were also employed for extinguishing gas fires and for seismic research. The US started its ‘peaceful nuclear explosion programme’, way back in the 1950s, as part of Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ proposal. Named Project Plowshare, it was publicly announced on 6 June 1958. The name Plowshare had its origin in the Bible:

And they will have to beat their
swords into plowshares and their spears
into pruning shears. Nation will not lift
up sword against nation, neither will
they learn war anymore.
- Isaiah 2:4

Between 1957 and 1973, as many as 27 experiments were carried out, in the US, using a total of 35 nuclear devices. A formal treaty, ‘Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Treaty-1976’, was signed by Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev, which came into force in 1990, whose text could be easily accessed from US government websites.

What was hailed as a peaceful initiative of nuclear weapon states was, however, decried as a rogue act, when India conducted its experiment in 1974. The result was a complete unilateral cessation of co-operation on civilian nuclear technology with India and, in fact, all high-tech cooperation with India in general.

But in all these lost decades, the Indian nuclear scientists at Kalpakkam and elsewhere had to toil to produce everything themselves; they could not buy what a Japanese or French fast breeder technologist could buy easily from the open market. But they rose to the challenge, ignoring constant needling from ill-informed sections of the media that India’s nuclear programme was a white elephant. They converted adversity into an opportunity, thought out of the box and innovated. Thus, the Indian fast breeder test reactor, (FBTR) which became operational in 1985, became the first reactor in the world to use uranium and plutonium carbide fuel. In the process, they also learnt how to use liquid sodium as a coolant – an admittedly difficult technology. Moreover, a host of industrial vendors were handheld and primed to produce high-quality nuclear equipment, machined to high precision, within tough deadlines.

Today, after 20 years of experiments, they have not only confidently designed a 500 M W prototype fast breeder reactor, but unlike most prototypes, have actually put their reputation on the line and committed to produce commercial power at a reasonable rate for the grid. This reactor will use uranium and plutonium oxide fuel, which will give even more power than the earlier carbide fuel.

Soon the fast breeder at Kalpakkam will go online, taking us to the very cutting edge. It is to be noticed that our scientists achieved all this on pitiful government salaries, whereas surely these brilliant engineers and scientists would have made millions of dollars in the greener pastures of Silicon Valley, as many others, whose success we toast, did!

Interview with Dr Baldev Raj, Director, IGCAR, Kalpakkam

Dr Baldev Raj, Director, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

Firstly, when is the PFBR going to be commissioned?

We are planning to commission in June 2012 and we are very confident because the uncertainties have been removed. This being the first FBR in the world in the last 30 years, the international experience was also limited. So we had to do a lot of mock-up trials especially at the site.
For example, doing a 13-metre stainless steel weld with very small tolerance on eccentricity; lowering a roof dome of 230 tonnes with a circumference tolerance of 3 mm in 13 metres and so on.
It is a result of confluence of the best minds of industry and the Department of Atomic Energy. We can very confidently say that the technology has been mastered and is deliverable on site. R&D has been converted into technology. We have built a very competent young team.

By commissioning, you mean the actual loading of the fuel and achieving criticality?

Yes. After that it will take 6-9 months to be connected to the grid. We want to go step by step because it is a very large core with a large amount of plutonium and sodium. We are doing it for the first time.

How many tonnes?

In the actual vessel there will be 11 tonnes of sodium and two tonnes of plutonium. We can decide to go low power and then high power and so on.

How many tonnes of uranium will be there?

About eight.

This will be carbide or oxide fuel?

This will be oxide. Since it is a large investment we made a sub-assembly for validation with all the components coming from India and that sub-assembly of our design gave us 110,000 MW day per tonne.
We are yet to do the post-radiation examination but we have studied the power output and there was no breach of the cladding. No problem in handling. It was completed two months back.

After the 2004 tsunami there must have been some design changes and new protective measures put in for any such eventuality. Can you explain them?

We had a national committee of best experts. It examined the measures already taken. This exercise was done for the whole Kalpakkam campus and not just the fast breeder. It covered the residential campus, the MAPP reactors and IGCAR. We found that this place was well designed for the tsunami of the kind we had.
If you recall, we were back in operation within two weeks. However, the foundation of the fast breeder which was being built at that time had a deposit of the material that came with the tsunami.
So we studied what degradation the concrete had gone through due to the deposit, whether sodium or chlorine has gone in; what has happened to the long-term durability of the foundation etc.
We did modelling as well as actual testing. The foundation was okay but after discussion with the regulatory body and departmental discussions, we decided to put a barrier layer and a fresh foundation was laid on that and we carried on.

So that also elevated it further?

Yes that was another by-product, it got elevated by another two metres.

What about levees and barriers?

They were already there but we redesigned it. More important was the psyche of the people in the township because there were 30 deaths. Many people wanted to leave the organisation itself due to family pressure.
We have used boulders, mangroves and a unique barrier which will take a tsunami even greater than the last one. We also put in an alarm system based on seismic events around the world.
Anyway, our reactor people constantly observe all geological events so we have a warning system based on that irrespective of what the country decides to do. This warning is given to the villages and all our people.
We use hooters along the coast. We have also educated the people on disaster management. The biggest challenge for me was to keep the people together and give them confidence. Whatever happened was a natural calamity but we can be prepared for it in the future.

How would you describe the safety features built into the fast breeders?

The fast breeder satisfies all the current safety norms for nuclear reactors. There is a steady state of the nuclear reactor system. There can be transient states. These transient states should not damage the core leading to an accident.
So there are various mechanisms set up to see that the core is not damaged during any such event.
The reactor may be crammed so that power is reduced, controlling the temperature and the neutronics. In addition, in our system there is sodium, which catches fire if it comes into contact with air.
So one should prevent sodium leaks and have large number of sensors to check for leaks. Sodium in contact with moisture produces hydrogen so we need to detect even small amounts of hydrogen and so on.
In short, there are some generic safety measures that prevent the transient to affect the core and then there are specifics, like in our case sodium-related. There are design-based accidents and non-design-based accidents which one needs to take care of.

There are dumps to remove sodium?

They are there in critical systems. We do not like to totally shut down the reactor system, as sodium solidifies on cooling and then it becomes a problem to restart the system. So certain heaters are installed.

You have gravity-based systems?

The dumping systems are gravity-based systems, thus even if there is total power failure etc as it happened in Fukushima nuclear plant (in Japan after the recent tsunami), we will have safety.

Do you classify it as third generation or better in the normal parlance, in terms of safety?

In fact fourth generation reactors that are being talked about are fast breeders or molten salt reactors. They are sustainable. In generation there is economy and safety which defines it. In our case, if you look at the whole fuel cycle, you have to do much less uranium mining.
Plus, the long-lived radioactive actinides in the waste are recycled and burnt so that repository load decreases.
In economy a fast reactor would be expensive compared to boiling water reactors but if you put up 20 of them then it would be comparable to water reactors. This can be built in five years. We have a complete road map and we are making the essential design changes to ensure that.

How do you compare the safety systems there with that of European Pressurised Reactor from France or VVER (water-cooled, water-moderated energy reactor) from Russia?

For the common man we have to ensure the same level of robustness as far as safety is concerned even if the underlying science is different. Every reactor system has a specific dynamics of steady state, transient and accidental.
Those scenarios are discussed between the designers and utility and then the regulatory boards.
Many times the regulators ask us to do more calculations and modelling or experiments. The EPR is an evolutionary reactor, where they have built 1,000 MW and now they are going for 1650 MW. Fast reactors have been built in France, Russia etc we have studied their experience and have also studied various scenarios, seismic qualifications, thin structures etc.
We have ensured that these reactors are comparable to water reactors. We have barriers and margins. There are multi barriers and there are margins at each barrier, then the damage at each barrier in the case of accident becomes less and less.
Even in the extreme case of core meltdown, where will it go, will it go critical, how much will leak out etc -- even those issues are studied.

In the case of EPR some anxiety is there because of the size of the Jaitapur project. For example, we are building 2x1000 MW in Koodankulam but nowhere in the world are there10,000 MW nuclear islands, so how do you assure the public that the environmental impact or sea temperature rise would be tolerable?

There are internationally accepted scientific environmental impact studies and modelling. That is not a problem, so is the sea temperature issue.

Radiation hazard-related issues are no longer being raised in nuclear projects. Nowadays it is all about land acquisition policy and the possible effect on marine life due to sea temperature rise.

Land acquisition is not a science issue but others can be satisfactorily answered even to the last citizen of the nation, because livelihood is involved and climate change issues are involved. Land acquisition is a political question, which has to be sorted out in a democratic way.

In FBR, is fuelling on a campaign mode or continuous?
It will be in a campaign mode unlike the PHWRs (pressurised heavy water reactors) where it is continuous. We have designed and validated our fuel elements for 100,000 MWday/tonne burn rate, but in the future we aim to design and validate for 200,000 MWday/tonne. Then we will change the cladding material, wrapper material and go for advanced materials.

How long will your initial load of 10 tonnes of fuel last?

Two years at 100,000 MW/day.

Just to compare, how much does the VVER in Koodankulam or EPR yield?

They yield 75,000 MWday/tonne. The advantage is the life of the fuel element is only two years. So I can put my new advanced fuel with higher burn rate right in this reactor after two years.

India is already at the cutting edge in research publication in fast breeders and thorium reactors. We look forward to the commissioning this landmark reactor. Wish you all the best.

K Subrahmanyam - A conversation on India and Geopolitics

2011-02-04T21:33:00.004+05:30

A conversation with K Subrahmanyam
(July 29, 2008)
Shivanand Kanavi had a wide ranging conversation with K Subrahmanyam on a variety of strategic and geo-political issues: about India’s Nuclear Weapon Program, Indo-US nuclear deal, Af-Pak, India’s global ambitions and so on. Even though KS was already battling Cancer bravely, he gave undivided attention with excellent recall about the topics under discussion.

Krishnswami Subrahmanyam (1929-2011): IAS(1951)Tamil Nadu; Fellow in Strategic Studies, London School of Economics1966-67; Director ,Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (1st term1968-75, 2nd term 1980-87); Chairman, Joint Intelligence Committee1977-79; Secretary(Defence Production)1979-80; Visiting Professor international relations St.John's Convenor, National Security Advisory Board 1998-2000; Chairman , Kargil Review Committee-1999
The interview is appeared in Rediff in two parts.
http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-an-interview-with-k-subrahmanyam/20110210.htm
and
http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-part-two-an-interview-with-k-subrahmanyam/20110420.htm

Shivanand Kanavi: I want you start with an over view of the history of Indian nuclear weapons programme.
K Subrahmanyam: If you go back to Nehru’s writings in the 40s he recognized that it may be used (as a weapon) and then India also must have it. But at the same time he was a man of peace he wanted international peace so he was essentially he was for development of technology. But he did not overlook the fact that it had a strategic dimension. It comes out very clearly that at one point in time in 1954-55 Homi Bhabha after presiding over the Geneva conference on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, came back with great enthusiasm and proposed to Nehru that India should amend the constitution and say that it would never go nuclear. Nehru wrote back to Bhabha that he should look after physics and leave the international relations to Nehru. We will think about these things when we reach that stage. So at one point of time it was Bhabha who was a peacenik, but as they saw the two major powers accumulating more and more weapons and developing newer weapons and China going nuclear, I presume that Bhabha got converted to the view that India should also go nuclear. The selection of CANDU reactor which would produce plutonium and deputation of Sethna to France to get reprocessing technology would all show that at least in Bhabha’s mind strategic programme was very much there.
Perkovich says Nehru all the time had it in mind but those who think of Nehru as essentially a man of peace would dispute it but it is difficult to say unless personal papers of Nehru are made available. On the other hand in 1964 a few months before he died, while inaugurating the reprocessing plant he also said “come what may, we shall not make these evil things”. Once the Chinese conducted the test Bhabha was determined that India should go for it. Krishna Menon opposed Bhabha.
Once Shastri took over, he was not familiar with all these things and the first time Bhabha came to Delhi to meet him I was told that he was made to wait three days to get an appointment. He was used to an indulgent treatment by Nehru and so he was a little put off. Then Shastri appealed to UK for a nuclear umbrella against the Chinese threat. In the early 60s there was a discussion in the US whether India should be helped to become a nuclear power to neutralize China. This was even before ‘62 as they realized that China was close to building the bomb. It was supported by Dean Rusk in the State Dept but was opposed by Pentagon and McNamara. In ‘64 Bhabha was able to persuade Shastri to sanction SNEP (Subterranean Nuclear Explosion Project). In early ‘65 there was a AICC session in Durgapur and there was pressure from some Congress members K C Pant who was a young MP who said that India should go nuclear. Shastri did not want to commit himself so finally he said ‘not now’. He did not rule it out. To some extent it helped Bhabha in getting the SNEP project sanctioned and it was under SNEP that Ramanna , Chidambaram, P K Iyengar were brought into Trombay. Then Bhabha died in the accident in 1966. Sarabhai took over.
Sarabhai coming from a Gandhian background was opposed to it. He argued that we did not have enough plutonium at that time and even by ‘67 if we had enough for one test then what would you do after wards. Thus he alienated the Trombay people. The result was they boycotted Sarabhai and did not share any information with him. But Sarabhai was a gentleman and a very astute man and over a period of time he changed his mind. Not many people know about it but he himself told me the last time we met in Aug 1971 while having dinner at Ashoka Hotel five months before he died. Then the Trombay people made Purnima the Fast Pulsed Reactor using plutonium from Candu. In 1967 Indira Gandhi sent Sarabhai and L K Jha on a worldwide mission seeking nuclear security guarantee for India. They went to Russia, France, US and UK. They wanted a joint guarantee. They did not get it. In 1965 when the NPT resolution was moved we were one of the sponsors. We propounded the balancing principle viz. no more proliferation but weapon powers should negotiate give up their weapons. When the matter came up in Geneva in 1967 our delegate V C Trivedi found that something else was going on. They wanted to prevent everybody else from going nuclear but on the other hand they did not want to have any limits on what they were doing. He made powerful arguments against this NPT and they are still quoted today. To some extent the P-5 found that India was a thorn in their flesh in Geneva. In 1968 when the matter came up regarding whether we should accede to NPT (it was not debated much in the cabinet) Mrs Gandhi and her close advisors like G Parthasarathy, P N Haksar were all against it. At that time I was the director of IDSA (Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis) and conducted a crusade against the NPT that India should go nuclear. At that time there were a group of parliamentarians called Young Turks who were leftist Congressmen like Krishan Kant who were for India going nuclear. Because of that we became good friends and I used to give Krishan Kant questions to ask in the parliament.
Sarabhai knew that Kant was asking ‘my’ questions. So in 1971 during dinner he told me “Subbu you can call off your blood hound (Krishan Kant), I am going to Mururoa Atoll to witness a French nuclear test”. The Gandhian of ‘67 had changed enough to go and witness the tests. So I said “Vikram, do I draw conclusions from this”. He said you do what you like.
However till he died there was no reconciliation between him and the Trombay group. Sarabhai anyway will be remembered as the founder of our space programme. Then according to the version given to me by Ramanna in 1972 October during the convocation of IIT Bombay, Mrs Gandhi summoned Sethna and Ramanna and gave the go ahead for testing. Then they started designing the test. Preliminary work had already gone on but Sarabhai had suspended it. But Purnima reactor had give them some ideas about the behavior of neutrons and plutonium etc. Between 1972 and 74 they worked on it. Ramanna has recorded that even in 1974 people like P N Dhar and Haksar got cold feet and it was Mrs Gandhi who told them to go ahead.

SK: Why were they hesitant, because of possible sanctions from US etc.?
KS: Yes. At that time US had become friendly to China and treated us as an ally of Soviet Union so they came down on us very severely.

SK: We already had a treaty with Soviet Union!
KS: Yes and also they could not forgive us for creating Bangladesh, a new country on the map which nobody had done after 1945! The sanctions started. That time we did not know that Pakistan had started its programme and was collecting money among the Islamic states.
When Janata government came in, Morarji Desai did not like nuclear explosion and did not like Ramanna (since he had led the test). He even denied that there was any nuclear test. He continued to hold that tonnes of explosives were buried and exploded!
SK: Is it because he thought Mrs Gandhi did it merely to over awe the domestic opposition and not for any strategic reasons?
KS: Yes. At that time US was trying to persuade us to adopt full scope safe guards—that is everything should come under safe guards. Mr Shankar who was Morarji Desai’s secy was in favour of it. So he told the Americans that we will examine it. So Americans were confident that India would accept it. Sethna was opposed to full scope safe guards. Morarji had said in the parliament that Americans are proposing it and there is nothing wrong in examining it. Actually I discovered through Sethna that the proposal was originated by Shankar and not Americans. So I got a copy of the note from the Americans to Sethna which called it “Mr Shankar’s proposal”. I got a photocopy of it and brought it to the Cabinet Secretary Nirmal Mukherjee that Morarji Desai can be cited for contempt of parliament since he had said in the parliament that it was an American proposal where as it was actually Shankar’s proposal. So the Cabinet Secy took it to Morarji.

SK: Was Shankar’s proposal for the cabinet?
KS: No. It was for Indians to discuss with Americans. Thus it was buried. Then Morarji went and made a speech in the UN General Assembly saying we will not conduct any more explosions. After he had read out that portion of his speech in the cabinet a message was sent through the then president Sanjiva Reddy to drop it from his speech. But inspite of that Morarji said it in the UN and he faced a lot of opposition when he came back. He tried to wriggle out saying I said an explosion and not test etc etc. At that time Ramanna was also taken out of BARC and put in as Scientific Advisor to Defence Ministry. Of course that did a lot of good to the Defence Ministry. But the Trombay team had been dismantled. Then in 1979 I produced a report saying Pakistan is going nuclear.

SK: How did you reach that conclusion?
KS: We got intelligence information. We knew about A Q Khan coming back and starting Uranium enrichment etc. I told the cabinet secretary to take it to the five-member Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs. He did it and there was a discussion. I was not present but Nirmal Mukherjee told me since I had to write the minutes, that the decision to resume the programme was taken but it was not unanimous. Three had voted for it and two had opposed it. He asked me to guess who were the two that had opposed the programme. I said one was Morarji and that was correct but I could not figure out who was the second. It was Atal Bihari Vajpayee! H M Patel, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram were for going ahead with our nuclear programme.
Then the Morarji govt fell and Charan Singh came. Sethna said he can manage the whole programme himself. In fact he was trying to fill up director’s post in BARC so that Ramanna will not be able to get back but that was prevented. But when Mrs Gandhi came back she posted Ramanna back to Barc and he held both the posts. Then the programme was restarted by 1983 we were again ready.

SK: Was it for weapon testing?
KS: Yes for weapons. The shafts were sunk in Pokharan but at the last moment the Americans found out through satellites and put pressure on us. Mrs Gandhi told them to stop it at the last minute. In fact it was those shafts of 1983 that were used for tests in 1998!
In 1984 we got involved in “six nation five continents” initiative.

SK: With Rajiv Gandhi..
KS: It started with Indira Gandhi and after her assassination it continued with Rajiv Gandhi. Essentially we ourselves were advocating CTBT.

SK: But it also involved some graduated disarmament along with ban on testing.
KS: Yes. We were in the fore front of it. When Rajiv took over, in 1985 Rajiv had a very intensive discussion with a group of us and I was also involved in it. He was at that time very much opposed to our going nuclear and he was very much in tune with the 6 nation initiative.

SK: Why was he opposed to it? Was it for economic reasons of sanctions etc.?
KS: No. He was new to politics and I think he was temperamentally a man of peaceful intent. He genuinely believed that if we can avoid it then we should avoid it. For one year I had arguments with him and at one point in time I told him that “PM sir, if you won’t take this decision, one day your defence expenditure will go through the roof”. So he asked the others present about it. Some agreed and others did not. Adm. Tahiliani was also present representing the Chiefs of Staff. He said we will give you a very serious quantified answer to this. PM said OK. The committee consisted of Abdul Kalam, R Chidambaram, Gen K Sunderji (Chmn) Adm Nayyar, Air Marshal Green. That group produced a report and for the first time it said a minimum credible deterrent of about 100 war heads can be developed in about 7 years and it will cost about Rs7000 crores. Only one copy of the report was prepared and delivered to Rajiv personally by Sunderji. We don’t know what happened to it afterwards.

SK: By that time were there no reports of Pakistani programme?
KS: Yes they were there but I was not in the government so I did not know about them. Thus he essentially stopped it. For some reason his relations with Raja Ramanna also deteriorated and he did not accept Ramanna’s recommendation of making P K Iyengar his successor. He selected M R Srinivasan, who had nothing to do with the weapons programme. So at that stage it was obvious that Rajiv was not interested in pursuing the weapons programme. He went to US he had a successful meeting with Reagan there was an agreement on science and technology but I do not think he was given any promise regarding civilian nuclear reactors. He was hoping for reactors from Russia and at that time Koodunkulam was under discussion.
However I am told that research went on and Rajiv did not stop it and then in 1988 he came out with his disarmament plan and put it before the UN and then to his horror he discovered that no one took any notice of it. He came back a disillusioned man and on the day of Air Force demo at Tilpat outside Delhi he said let us go ahead. Thus in ‘89 March or so he sanctioned the weapons programme.

SK: There is also a rumour about Operation Brass tacks and some message delivered by Pakistan during that exercise that they have the bomb etc..
KS: I will come to that. Even though the weapons programme was sanctioned only in 1989 the missile programme was sanctioned in 1984-85. In fact Indira Gandhi had sanctioned it and Kalam had been brought in specially from the space programme. In 1987 when the Operation Brass tacks took place, A Q Khan gave an interview to Kuldeep Nayyar and said, “you people be careful, we have got the bomb”. During the Kargil committee hearing Mr S K Singh who was the High Commissioner in Pakistan in the 80’s told me that in Jan ‘87, he was summoned by the Minister of State of Defence of Pakistan, who told him that if India takes any action then ‘we are in a position to inflict unacceptable damage’, which is a code to say we have the nuclear weapon. Rajiv knew all that but he still tried very hard and finally in ‘89 the same man sanctioned the weapons programme. By 1990 we had not assembled many weapons but Americans came to us and said that Pakistan is threatening to use nuclear weapons against India. This was in May 1990 but in Feb ‘90 Gen Yakub Khan came to India when Kashmir was on the boil and he told I K Gujral, “if you people use too much of force in Kashmir, there will be fire from the sky and rivers of blood will flow”. I K Gujral took him to V P Singh and he repeated the same thing. He would not look people in the eye but recite it as if he has been instructed to recite it. It was interpreted by India as a nuclear threat. In May US sent a mission led by Robert Gates, the present Defence Secretary to Pakistan and they told the Pakistanis ‘be careful do not try any adventure’ (according to US version) then they came to India. Here they did not say anything but to the rest of the world they said, “we diffused a nuclear crisis between India and Pakistan”.
However in a new book two American scientists have claimed that on 26th of May, 1990 actually the Chinese conducted a nuclear test for Pakistan. So they had come to dissuade Pakistan from doing it. Instead they put out the story about India-Pakistan. So Pakistan actually had a tested nuclear weapon by 1990 and not in 1998.

SK: That test was done in Lop Nor?
KS: Yes in Lop Nor. P V Narasimha Rao continued the programme. During NPT review conference in 1995, NPT was extended indefinitely and unconditionally. PV knew that we will be left out so he wanted to conduct a test. Preparations were all made but again the Americans discovered it and they put pressure to stop it. That is a fact.

SK: How did they find it?
KS: Through satellites. So PV could not conduct the test. When Vajpayee took over PV sent him a note saying ‘I could not do it, you do it’. Vajpayee acknowledged it after PV died. In 1998 however we were able to hide it. Both sides conducted the test.

SK: There is a claim that in 1998 we conducted a thermo-nuclear test as well.
KS: That is what R Chidambaram says. The problem is 1998 tests were done in shafts that were sunk in 1983. They were capable of taking only 60-70 kilo tons. It is also right in Rajasthan which may be sparsely populated compared to rest of India but it is still populated. So there is no way you can conduct a megaton test. Chidambaram says he did at 45 kilo ton but there are lots of people who question it.

SK: Post 1998 how did this inclusion of India into the club take place? The French have claimed that they were responsible for it.
KS: Within two years even the Americans started being friendly to us. We realized that US was not hostile to us during the Kargil war, when Clinton did not side with Pakistan but sided with us. Then in 2000, Clinton had a very popular visit to India. To that extent the relationship with US started improving.
There was always a feeling among the major powers of the world, excepting China, that India was not an irresponsible power that it had already conducted a nuclear test in 1974 and had not rushed to build a nuclear arsenal. The Russians, French and even the Americans knew the China-Pakistan connection. How China had helped Pakistan develop nuclear weapons etc. The Indian compulsions were known.
The French president’s advisor did tell me that they took the initiative but that was after George Bush took office. Chirac rang him up. Russians have always been well disposed towards India. I have a feeling that during Bush—Vajpayee interaction they had already started developing the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership. We were asking the Americans to show progress in three things: nuclear, space and hitech. Those discussions were going on. The American administration at that time, with Colin Powell as Secretary of State, were not so favourably inclined to take such a major quantum jump. That came about in Bush’s second term, when Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State. They had in mind China’s dominance in Asia and the need to have some balance in Asia so when Man Mohan Singh met George W Bush in Oct 2004 during UNGA, they had a discussion but it is not quite clear whether Man Mohan Singh made any request regarding this or not. But definitely by 2005 March when Condi Rice came to India the Americans had made up their mind that they would help us in this respect. I would give a lot of credit for this to Bush and to a lesser extent to Condi Rice. These two really brought this about. Personally they were influenced by their idea of balance of power in Asia. They were not doing it because they liked us, but they were doing it for their own purposes. They could of course count on the help of France, Russia and Britain.

SK: Did Russia help us in the nuclear submarine? After all we have not designed even a conventional submarine so far.
KS: Yes they helped us with the design of compact nuclear reactor that was necessary. They are also giving us a hunter-killer nuclear sub on lease. Earlier they leased another one during Rajiv’s time. So there is no doubt there is Russian help. The PM has also publicly acknowledged it.
Our nuclear establishment is very small compared to other major powers. The Indian approach can be characterized as what we say in Tamil Nadu as that of Tirupati barber. When people take their children for tonsure at Tirupati, the barber clips a few locks of one child and goes to the next one because now he has “booked” this child…Then he will take his own time to do all the things. So whether we design aircraft at HAL or this, it is the same. The only people who are a little different are the space department. Everybody else say yes to everything when they have one design team.

SK: Even the missile programme has not delivered what it promised…
KS: Yes in 1985 I asked Kalam, “with the number of people you have, will you be able to deliver this in this time frame?” He said yes, yes we will.

SK: There is one project which has never been talked about openly called “Surya”, which is an ICBM, what is its status?
KS: People have been mentioning it, but does India require an ICBM? India needs a missile which reaches Beijing and Tientsin. That is about 4000-5000 km missile. If you start designing an ICBM beyond that range, you will make the Americans wary. Are we likely to go to war with Americans? Our people talk about our submarines going to the Pacific to target China. But there is no need for it. Your submarines can be in the Bay of Bengal and with a missile of 4000-5000 km range you easily target Beijing and China.

SK: After the cold war, the Russian weapon supplies have become uncertain. Then there is objection to American end user arrangements etc. then should we focus on domestic defence production rather than imports?
KS: People should be realistic. Even the LCA has an American engine. In short the answer is: in the world’s arms market the demand is shrinking since the cold war ended. There is not going to be a war between major powers of the world. There may be wars between say US and Iraq or Afghanistan etc even they would be only after a short duration. Therefore the armaments demand has come down. There are only three centres of armament production: US, Russia and Europe. They can incur the R&D cost and production costs only if they have a market. The right thing would be to get into co-production arrangements with Russian companies etc. The Chinese do not have access to US market, we have an advantage. Chinese can have only Russian weapons. So why don’t we build up on this advantage. To build up defence R&D and production capacities like them, would take us many years and decades and resources. We have so many other demands for resources. So commentators should have balanced idea of these things.

SK: Now that Obama administration has many non-proliferationists what do you think India should do with NPT review conference and CTBT and FMCT coming up?
KS: NPT review conference coming up. We are not going to be invited since we are not members of NPT. You might get everybody into non-proliferation regime as El Baradei has been talking about but not in the treaty, otherwise it will unravel. Others will say you are rewarding India, Pakistan and Israel for not signing up. If Obama succeeds in signing CTBT then we will be under pressure to sign it.

SK: Was it wise for Vajpayee to say in the UN that if US, China etc sign it then India will not come in the way?
KS: He had to as he was under pressure. I have a question. Under what circumstances would we need to resume the tests? If there is such a grave deterioration in the international situation at some point in future then anyway before you others would have resumed testing.

SK: Or if your weapons become obsolete..
KS: There is not much chance of weapons becoming obsolete. The scenario of you alone being called upon to resume testing while the rest of the world does not is farfetched. I cannot visualize it.

SK: There is also computer simulation and sub-kilo ton tests to improve weapon design. Do we have the capacity for it?
KS: If we do not have it then we should develop it. You have to look at your man power and how many weapons you need. You should be prepared to sign up if finally US and China ratify it first. That is not going to be tomorrow or day after. With regard to FMCT we have said we will agree provided you have a verifiable agreement. That is going to take quite some time. Are we short of plutonium? Or is the constraint in reprocessing and fabrication? In which case don’t blame the FMCT for that.

SK: We have stockpile for another 80-100 weapons.
KS: Yes we do. Americans and Russians are planning to bring down theirs to 1500. Then what do we need? So we have to have clear ideas on that.

SK: What is your view of what is happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
KS: There is no way Americans can leave Afghanistan and Pakistan.

SK: Don’t you think the current Af-Pak policy is actually an exit policy?
KS: Yes but the main problem is they are trying to make Pakistanis fight the war in their own country.

SK: Some people say US is outsourcing IT to India and war to Pakistan…
KS: Yes but Pakistanis are also trying to play all sorts of smart games. In the process what is going to happen to Pakistan and US-Pakistan relations is very difficult to predict. When Hillary Clinton was here she made a statement which was not picked up by media. She said in the interview to NDTV that 9/11 plot was hatched in Pakistan. And the plotters are still there. All that Obama has said is that we will go after them. Pakistanis may think, like many others that Americans will tire out and go away and then they can resume their games. What they do not understand is if Americans start tightening up saying if you fight there will be money and if you don’t fight then there will be no money then what will happen, we have to see. Their economy is in shambles. So the question is how Americans will manage that aspect. Secondly Pakistanis are finding that the chaps who they raised are turning against them. It is the nature of these Jihadi organizations that they have to be against somebody or the other. They will say that Pakistani state is on the side of the Americans. So Pakistanis will have to face that too. So they cannot play a double game for too long.

SK: You think they have made the choice?
KS: They are trying not to make the choice. At present they have taken on the Pakistani Taliban and even in that there are serious questions regarding the seriousness of the fighting. They go on saying we have killed so many and still they have not got any leaders. They seem to have displaced a lot of civilians and how long can that continue? They have been very short sighted. Americans have already arranged an alternative supply line with the Russians and they are listening to the conversations of these people quietly, just as they did during 26/11. So they know what is going on. The question is who is going to outsmart whom.

SK: What do you think about what Man Mohan Singh has started?
KS: I have a feeling that you might have peace and stability with all other states: Bangaldesh and others and even with China but I doubt very much you will be able to do that with Pakistan. They are not a rational state. For them hatred of India is over powering.

SK: Don’t you think that at least in a section of people; youth, businessmen etc in Pakistan that there is feeling that peace will mean sharing prosperity on both sides etc.?
KS: That kind of middle class is not very large in Pakistan, neither has it been allowed to grow.

SK: Musharraf’s proposals looked actually reasonable.
KS: Musharraf’s proposals can be looked at even though his idea of joint management is vague, through which he wanted to tell his people that now he can control Indian Kashmir also etc. On the other hand we would say we will also have say on your side and between the two systems let us see where Kashmiris on both sides would go. But the main point is still even among the middle class the hatred of India is still very strong. So they are not ready to condemn LeT. They have subliminal sympathy.

SK: Is that because of Kashmir?
KS: No that is not because of Kashmir, in fact Kashmir is because of two-nation theory, jihadi mentality etc. I have also interacted with Pakistanis. Javed Jabbar who used to be a minister who was born in Madras, (his father was commissioner of police). He once told me, there will be no peace in South Asia till India breaks up into constituents. First of all they convinced themselves that Islam alone will unify and Hinduism cannot. It is a difficult and troubled state.

SK: If India has to become a major power it has to have economic strength and reasonable relations with its neighbours. Even China has not achieved reasonable relations with neighbours yet.
KS: What is our problem with the neighbours? So long as our relations with China and US were troubled, our neighbours took advantage of it. If you improve relations with China and US you will find that all your neighbours will adjust themselves.

SK: But is that possible? Chinese look at us as some sort of surrogates of US.
KS: It is possible. China is going to grow unless there are problems internally in China and the system changes. India will also grow. China will catch up with US in over all GDP even though they may not have per capita income. Americans want to keep up their pre-eminence in terms of military, economic and technological power. China is an aging country. US and India are not yet aging, at least for another 30 years.

SK: The issue however is America can continue its pre-eminence only if it aligns strongly with India. Only then it will have access to man power, innovation, technology etc.
KS: You are quite right. That is why US needs India and India needs US. What would be the Chinese reaction to this alliance? China and US are not going to fight with each other. It is a rivalry between the two for the top position in the world. I have seen many people say, why should we choose Americans why not Chinese after all we have a 5000 year old relationship etc etc. So I tell them, “Don’t worry about yourself but ask your son and grandson where they want to go to China or US and you will have the answer!”
Some say Harvard or Beijing. I would go even a step further. Where would you be able to build a Balaji temple or a Meenakshi temple in China, which you can in US. Democratic, English speaking and so on. Regarding China, it should be ‘if you are not friendly to us we will intensify our relationship with US. We are prepared to balance our relationship with both of you. But if you are not going to be civil to us we will intensify our collaboration with them’. So ultimately it has to be a three power game in the world. After all Russia, Japan, Europe are all aging. Even Chinese are now thinking of authorizing a second child. The kind of stupidities they have done are amazing! India does not have to worry about its rise.
Whether it is Obama or George Bush, US is not giving up ambition to build up an unrivalled military force in the world, which no single power or a combination of powers can challenge. They will always have that goal. Today 50% of the world’s military expenditure is incurred by the US and more than 50% of R&D expenditure of the world. On that I don’t think there will be any slack. I think Obama feels that dealing with all these nations, engaging them is a better strategy than confronting them. It is a sensible strategy. He is not doing it because US is overstretched. After all the reserve currency of the world is dollar. Rouble was never the reserve currency of the world!
The Americans rightly claim that they are also a soft power.

SK: Some say, perhaps the only other country that can rival US in soft power in terms of culture, movies, religions etc is India.
KS: In due course. You have the potential that is the reason why the two countries getting together is an event that is long overdue and is taking place now. It has nothing to do with Obama or anybody else, it is a natural process.

SK: So far Indian military has been quite defensive but it looks like it is modernizing now for force projection into Indian Ocean, Africa etc to defend Indian investments abroad.
KS: The Americans do not send their expeditionary force into all those countries where they own property or have business interests. They try to do it by influencing various groups in those countries. Therefore when we talk of our expansion etc we should also expand our ability to influence events in those countries. We should be able to befriend various parties, groups and interests in most of those countries. In future force projection by way of going and occupying a country is going to be less and less. Because you can defeat an army but the real problem is how do you occupy a country, as Iraq and Afghanistan show its futility. You could do it in 18th and 19th century, you could do it upto Hitler but not after that. Therefore people who talk about force projection don’t know what they are talking about. We are expanding our Navy for the security of shipping lanes, maritime terrorism, piracy etc it is not to threaten anybody.
But your economic power, your technological power commercial power those are things that make up real power. When the depression happened and America collapsed, it did not matter to China or Japan but today when American banks fail the Chinese are seriously affected. If the dollar goes down Chinese are worried. Not only that even if somebody catches flu in the US, the world has to be put on alert! That was not the case before.
There is no doubt that Americans are not only dominant but they think they are a power that can dictate terms to the rest of the world and that is objectionable. Of course that is not working. Increasingly countries are defying the Americans. We should not try to copy the “ugly American”. Already we have a reputation of doing that in our neighbourhood. That needs to be corrected. A day should come when Nepal. Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka (I am still leaving out Pakistan) would be able to have a common market even something like European Union.

SK: In fact one country which seems to be neglected in that respect is Bangladesh. In fact it is very crucial for the development of North east, Burma and our whole Look East policy.
KS: That is right but they were very nasty to us. Only now we have a new government and we should also not forget that basically it is still East Pakistan. It will take time. Most importantly India should look after her people their food security, health and education then India will automatically become a major power.

SK: Thank you very much for giving me such a lot of time despite your health. You should write books. Why should we read Stephen Cohen or George Perkovich etc as authoritative accounts on Indian affairs?
KS: Unfortunately our government does not declassify archives like Americans do, moreover when these guys come here, all our politicians, bureaucrats etc talk to them. They get much greater access to people in power than us. Besides, they also have access to the American declassified documents.

SK: Thanks for your valuable time and insights.