R A Mashelkar--Catalyst for Change

Business India, June 28-July 11, 1999

CEO of CSIR Inc

Under his leadership, 40-odd laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research have not only undergone a culture change, but are showing what proactive management is all about. In the general atmosphere of despair, R.A. Mashelkar, FRS, has shown that one man can, even now, make a difference

Shivanand Kanavi

"Asking scientists to do industrial research is close to prostitution!" the director of a CSIR laboratory declared at a press conference 10 years ago.

last year CSIR labs earned Rs125 crore from industry.

In 1989 the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, a highly respected R&D centre worldwide, did not own a single US patent.

last year alone CSIR filed about 100 international patents. NCL was at the vanguard.


Tables, charts and computer graphics are eloquent about the money earned from industry, foreign clients contracted, interna­tional patents filed, and so on, by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The quantitative change becomes obvious at a glance. But they do not tell the story, the process. Neither do they indicate if, at some point, this quantitative change has led to a change in quality, a change in culture.

Talking about "managing change" is fashionable. A large number of books displayed prominently at airport bookstores for the benefit of travelling businessmen and executives give ready aphorisms on "change management", "managing chaos", and so on. However, they all read like fairy tales, possible only in enabling environments in distant developed economies. They make you feel good for some time, fill you with enthusi­asm to tryout the easily digestible, encapsulated pop wisdom. But in no time the ifs and buts butt in. And despair deepens as one re-enters real­ity before the flight of fancy ends. But, of course, one rationalises and conver­sations end with familiar justifica­tions: "In a country like India ... "

Under these conditions, the CSIR turnaround has generated consider­able optimism in India's science and technology circles, and increas­ingly among businessmen too. It is an excellent example of change manage­ment, in a 50-year-old institution, which could have fossilised and crum­bled in the post-1991 environment. Business India visited nine CSIR labora­tories in Lucknow, Jammu, Goa, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, and Dehradun, and talked extensively to businessmen and scientists to bring you this story.

Dr Raghunath A. Mashelkar, direc­tor-general of CSIR, speaks with great enthusiasm and optimism in public and in private that India will be one of the hubs of the future global knowl­edge economy. He showers the audi­ence with a host of catchy slogans. If you didn't know that the man was a distinguished scientist with a Fellow­ship of the Royal Society (an honour shared by only 35 Indian scientists and engineers in over three centuries), you could easily mistake him for a tacky copywriter. "At times it looks like he is overselling a bit, but look at his accomplishments in turning around CSIR," says Prof M.M. Sharma FRS, who was also his teacher at the University Department of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. "Change is always a product of proactive leader­ship and in India, where personalities matter so much, leadership is even more crucial," he adds. Naturally the story of change in CSIR is the story of Mashelkar's leadership.

"At a recent meet on R&D organised by an MNC he lifted up everybody's spirits, including that of international participants, with his vision," says Dr pradip, a well-known materials scien­tist from Tata Consultancy Services. "From anyone else it would have sounded like bombast, but Mashelkar has a good track record and there is absolute conviction in what he says. And that enables him to carry others with him."

Mashelkar understands the use of oft-repeated slogans and symbolism very well. He started his campaign to globalise Indian R&D and thereby elevate its quality and competitive­ness during his tenure as director of National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune. Though CSIR labs are not supposed to concentrate on pure science, a number of them have been producing a large number of high- quality scientific papers. For example, NCL alone used to produce over 250 papers (now close to 350), while the whole of Indonesia produces about 70. Mashelkar however knew that global knowledge markets do not pay much attention to research papers but they do if you have patents in critical areas.

"At times it looks like Mashelkar is overselling a bit, but his accom­plishments in turning around CSIR, are impressive" says Prof M.M. Sharma FRS, who was his teacher.

So he convinced his colleagues at NCL that, while the output of the labora­tory in terms of science was excellent, it had not staked its claim in technol­ogy markets with patents. In fact, NCL then did not have a single US patent.

Mashelkar advised his colleagues, many of them distinguished scientists on their own standing, to scan patent databases before they started a research project, to make sure that they weren't reinventing the wheel. He also asked them to scan their papers for any patentable (novel, non-­obvious, commercially exploitable) result and file a patent before sending it for publication. It was hard initially, because it is research publications that bring peer recognition in science and not patents. So he replaced the old adage in science "publish or perish" with a new slogan "patent, publish, and prosper". He tom-tommed it constantly and today it has caught on all over CSIR (see box). A new body NCL Research Foundation funded through donations gave away medallions to all US patent holders every year. A healthy competitive spirit developed, especially between the catalysis and polymer groups headed by two eminent scientists, Dr Paul Ratnasamy and Dr S. Sivram respectively. A few specialists were trained in writing patents. After all, patent-writing is an art where you give away the least amount of information while at the same time covering the flanks of your work so that others cannot easily bypass your patent. In the last five years CSIR has filed about 350 interna­tional patents and NCL is the leader in US patent applications from India.

Today Mashelkar is spearheading a campaign for patent literacy. "I compliment CSIR for creating an intel­lectual climate supportive of the early passage of the bill to amend the Patents Act," said Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, on 15 January 1999.

"While the team at the helm of CSIR has helped realise the goal, he as an individual has led them as one from within them. This approach makes all the difference,” comments Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Industries

That is a handsome compliment because only five years back there was deep opposition to amending the law both in Parliament and outside. A key factor that influenced this turnaround was CSIR'S victory in the turmeric case. At one stroke the turmeric case showed that the IPR system works if backed by proper documentation. That those advocating a change in patent laws are not necessarily "agents of multina­tionals". That urgent steps should be taken to spread patent literacy in scientific and business circles. That it is a two-way street and India's knowl­edge base, be it traditional or modern, requires protection too. At once Mashelkar became a swashbuckling national hero who" rescued haldi from Western biopirates".

Today the battle over patenting has been won. For example, two years back a brilliant young molecular biologist from the Centre for Cellular and Mole­cular Biology, Hyderabad, came to Mashelkar for advice. He had patented an innovation, published the paper, and a US biotech company had come to negotiate the commercial terms for exploiting his patent. Mashelkar was overjoyed because the same scientist in 1995 had argued passionately and boldly about keeping science away from commerce.

However, Mashelkar is not compla­cent. "Demands change as time moves on. Now, there will be a greater empha­sis on exploitation of patents, and income generated from them - and not merely on the number of patents." Even forward-looking entrepreneurs like Parvinder Singh and Anji Reddy hail him for his work in this regard.

"In fact one of his greatest contribu­tions to CSIR is to inculcate the culture of patenting. Many years before we filed patents from our research founda­tion, it was NCL which was at the fore­front of filing process patents licensing to big multinationals like Akzo. He was a kind of inspiration for me and always used to say that we should stand in the forefront in technology and file patents in developed countries. To that extent, I must admit that he has not only inspired scientists in CSIR to create wealth by harnessing intellectual prop­erty, but was also inspiration for all of us in the industry," says Reddy.

"To evaluate the contribution of Dr Mashelkar you have to look at the goals he had set for CSIR in 1996 to be achieved by the year 2001. I would say Mashelkar has set up very high stan­dards to achieve, but he is well on his way to meeting some of these," says Singh. "He has increased the awareness in the Indian scientific community towards patent-worthy innovations. He has also successfully defended our traditional intellectual wealth in the challenge to patents filed abroad," adds he.

Spreading its wings
Patents, however, are really a small part of a larger goal of turning India into a global R&D platform. But even that has required a change in the mindset. CSIR has had an open culture. So nothing passes through just because the director-general says so. In fact, individual directors have a lot of power and can act as satraps. It is extremely important for the top man to carry his 40 directors with him. What does globalising CSIR mean? Should publicly funded Indian R&D become an adjunct of multinational corporate R&D? While celebrating NCL'S golden jubilee earlier this year, several senior scientists who have retired from CSIR -like B.D. Tilak, L.K. Doreswamy, and A. V. Ramarao ­expressed the fear that NCL might become "a lab on rent" for MNCS

Poly-Mashelkar
Maharashtrians are prone to add kar to a profession, a characteristic, or a place and derive a surname out of it. So, recently, Mashelkar has been nicknamed Patentkar, Polymerkar, and so on by his compatriots. However, these names are inadequate as they reflect only some facets . of a multifaceted personality. His enthusi­asm for India and its future is infectious. In fact, only his track record and utter convic­tion in it makes it genuine rather than c1iche­ridden hyperbole. "How can I not be an optimist? I am what I am because of India," he says to sceptics. The truth in those words only becomes clear when you look at his childhood and the struggle that he has gone through to reach the present heights.

Raghunath Anant Mashelkar was born on 1 January 1943 in Mashel a small village in south Goa. The lone child almost died of smallpox when he was a little over a year old. With no land and Mumbai beckoning with means of livelihood in the difficult postwar years, the family joined thousands of others from Konkan who migrated to the city. A couple of years later Mashelkar lost his father at the age of six. His barely literate mother, Anjanitai Mashelkar, brought up her son with great courage, grit, and hunger for education. She drove Mashelkar forward at decisive moments in his life, when he could have easily succumbed to the overwhelming odds and given up.

The family lived in a crowded one-room chawl, sharing it with other migrant fami­lies in Deshmukh Galli in Khetwadi near Girgaum. His maternal uncle got him admitted into West Khetwadi Upper Primary School, a Marathi-medium munic­ipal school, where he was a consistent topper. When it was time for him to enter senior school (Std VIII), the high schools nearby needed Rs21 as an entrance fee. His mother, who was trying to provide for the family by doing all kinds of odd jobs in nearby households, could not rustle up the amount. It looked like curtains for Mashelkar's acade­mic career. But she didn't give up and finally managed to borrow it from a friend, who was also working as a household help. Mashelkar often publicly recounts that struggle for Rs21 . But by then a month had passed and admis­sions to many schools had closed. He eventu­ally joined Union High School in Girgaum.

"Poverty is not an abstraction or a statis­tic for me," says Mashelkar. "I walked bare­foot till I was 12. I remember that when we had weekly tests in school on Saturdays, and we had to carry our own answer paper, which cost 3 paise. One had to always wonder where that money would come from the next week." For this reason he almost gave up his studies at Std XI. Just then the Gomanthak Maratha Samaj came to his assistance with a modest scholarship.

Unable to have either privacy or space in the chawl, he studied for his matriculation under the streetlights of Chowpatty. The dazzling grades he got at the Std XII exams despite all the odds, standing 11 th in the board, were the turning point in his academic life. Not because of the marks themselves - after all, he was always used to excelling at studies - but in terms of the number of people who suddenly came forward to help him pursue his education further. That is how he did not have a partic­ularly difficult time getting Rs200 for his college admis­sion. Meanwhile, the Sir Dorab Tata Trust selected him for their coveted scholarship and considerably reduced his hardship. He fondly remembers that the trust's personnel even helped him improve his English language skills, public speaking, and so on. When he received the JRD Tata Award for corporate leadership recently, Mashelkar publicly expressed his gratitude to the Tata Trust. "Dr Mashelkar's vast knowl­edge and standing is deceptively hidden by his great humility," says Ratan Tata.

After two years at Jaihind College, Mashelkar chose to enter the relatively new field of chemical engineering at Bombay University's Department of Chemical Tech­nology. When he finished his BChem with flying colours and wanted to take up a job to ease the financial situation at home, his mother asked him a simple question: "What is the next degree in this subject?" And thus Mashelkar started and finished one of the quickest PhDs in chemical engineering. He was offered fellowships at some universities in North America, but a young professor called Manmohan Sharma, who had just returned after a brilliant innings at Cambridge, persuaded him to stay. That was the beginning of a legendary guru-shishya relationship. Today in chemical engineering Sharma and Mashelkar's names are always taken in the same breath.
After his PhD his mother encouraged him to go abroad and excel in his chosen field and there followed an illustrious career at the University of Salford, UK, where he estab­lished a first-rate group in polymer engineer­ing and carried out pioneering work in the field. He also came out of his guru's shadows in mass transfer and charted a new path. A few years back he presented a new paradigm at his Dankwerts' Memorial Lecture at Cambridge, where he championed "border­less chemical engineering". In short, he pointed out that future breakthroughs are going to come through sharing of ideas and techniques between various disciplines. "Borderless", a pet word in his vocabulary, also summarises his personality very well.

In 1975 Y. Nayudamma, the then direc­tor-general of CSIR who had a brief from Mrs Gandhi to entice some of the best Indian brains working abroad, sold him the idea of coming back to India and joining the National Chemical Laboratory. And thus started an intense 23-year commitment to CSIR and another chapter in his career as a polymer scientist, R&D manager, and vision­ary leader. It eventually won him widespread international recognition, including the pres­tigious Fellowship of the Royal Society. Unfortunately, health reasons kept that gritty woman, Anjanitai Mashelkar, away from the elaborate induction ceremony in London where Mashelkar signed the register of the Royal Society, which still carries the much­revered (and hence laminated) page 9 that carries the signature of Isaac Newton.


The whole debate would not have taken place 10 years ago. After all, NCL'S external earnings in hard currency were negligible then. Today it earns about $4 million annually, which constitutes 80 per cent of its industrial earnings. It has successfully networked with a number of global corporations. Several other labs are following NCL'S example and globalis­ing their clientele (see table). "Though one has to carefully allocate resources between contract research and origi­nal work, criticism that NCL is selling R&D cheaply to MNCS at the Indian taxpayers' expense is unjustified. NCL has no more than 10 foreign clients; its Indian clients number over 100! It is a different issue that Indian industry, which is still busy reverse-engineer­ing, may not be able to absorb some of the sophisticated work done in NCL in polymers and catalysis. But that's not its fault. Moreover, NCL has never sold R&D by 'man-hours' - only by 'brain hours', counters Mashelkar.

"When a GE team came to NCL to negotiate some pilot projects in 1992-93 they had come via Russia. When they saw the sum quoted by NCL for contract research they said that they could buy a whole R&D lab in Russia for that kind of money. I said, 'Go ahead and buy a Russian lab but come back to NCL if you want world­ class quality.' GE was finally convinced and, since then, has not looked back. In fact, NCL charges foreign clients at least five times what it does Indian clients. So I do believe that, without outpricing ourselves, we are getting outstanding results," he adds.

Cutting-edge work for foreign clients has many intangible benefits. It raises the quality of research of the whole lab. For example, GE ran its pres­tigious Six Sigma training course for NCL. Several scientists got training that they would otherwise never have got. Even contract research for foreign clients requires the use of cutting-edge biology and chemistry - no 'me too' products and processes. Time, quality, price, and delivery are all internation­ally benchmarked. CSlR is creating a cadre of top-class professionals who will serve Indian industry with highest level of skills. Ashok Ganguli, former R&D director of Unilever plc and current chairman of ICI India, completely supports Mashelkar's plan to globalise Indian R&D.

"I would say Dr Mashelkar has set up very high standards to achieve, but he is well on his way to meeting some of these," says Dr Parvindar Singh, Ranbaxy Laboratories

Spreading its wings worldwide has not been easy. Mashelkar has taken extra pains to achieve this. When he took over as the youngest director of NCL 10 years ago, he said in his inau­gural speech to the staff that his ambi­tion was to convert it into the "International Chemical Laboratory". As usual, he started turning the catchy slogan into a reality by hard-selling NCL to a number of multinationals. He has since used everything at his command to market CSlR globally, including his own impeccable scien­tific credentials. For example, in 1992, he visited GE'S corporate R&D at Schenectady in upstate New York to deliver a scientific talk on polymer engineering. He had, however, asked his contacts at GE to gather some busi­ness development people as well. The seminar soon became a presentation of NCL'S capabilities, including a pitch on a US patent obtained by NCL in "solid state poly-condensation" - a topic of interest to GE, which is the world leader in polycarbonates.

The one-hour seminar stretched to two. It then led to an extended lunch, where more executives joined. The lunch was followed by meetings with senior vps in the afternoon. And in the evening he had to change his flight plans for more serious talks. One of the vp’s exclaimed, "You speak our (corpo­rate) language. Nobody in publicly funded labs in the US seems to do so." Today GE'S corporate R&D considers its relationship with NCL as its most successful external relationship. It is a partnership in joint technology devel­opment and not "a lab on rent.”

The time is ripe to strike more such partnerships. Globally R&D and innovation have become a high-risk game for all high-technology corpora­tions. R&D is becoming very expensive and is yielding diminishing returns when carried out under a single roof. On the other hand, without innova­tion and new technology, one can lose one's business position very quickly. This dilemma has led to networking, outsourcing, strategic alliances, and partnerships in R&D. None of the Indian labs is in a position to develop a full-scale globally competitive tech­nology by itself and then license it worldwide. Partnerships, where they assume a junior position initially, can help them catch up with the rest of the world. So it is indeed a win-­win situation. After GE several other MNCS like DuPont and Smith Kline Beecham have come to various CSIR for R&D tie-ups.

Soon after he was appointed director-­general in 1995, Mashelkar said in an interview, "I would like to be known as the first CEO of CSIR mc." In effect, he was voicing his intense desire to turn the network of 40 disparate laborato­ries spread all over the country into a highly focused, goal-oriented, well ­networked organisation doing "research as business" and in the most businesslike manner. Within a short period of four years he has achieved his goal to a great extent.

"He always used to say that we should stand in the forefront of technology and file patents in developed countries. I must admit that he has not only inspired scientists in CSIR to create wealth by harnessing intellectual prop­erty, but also all of us in the indus­try," says Dr Anji Reddy

The sweeping economic changes in the 1990s have hit publicly funded R&D institutions globally. Budget cuts, scrambling for funds from industry, corporatisation, privatisation, and even closure have been the night­mares of any R&D manager in the world. Organisations in the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia which are similar in structure to CSIR have had a tumultuous decade. Even corporate R&D is in great turmoil worldwide. In India in the last few years, Hoechst (Hoechst Marion Rous­sel), Hindustan Lever, and Ciba-Geigy (Novartis) have either closed down their R&D labs or sold them. In this context one could safely say that CSIR is introducing cultural changes, which are pioneering not only in India but also globally.

The new businesslike approach is palpable. For example, annual reports of government institutions are not particularly known either for readabil­ity or transparency. The bulk of one report is repeated the next year, thereby making it opaque for anyone to figure out what actually was done in the current year that was different from last year. The annual report of the Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun, reads differently. The achievements of the last year are unambiguously stated with clear graphics. "We believe in 'delta reports' (delta is the mathematical symbol for incremental change)", says T.S.R. Prasad Rao who was the director of the lab till recently.

In another instance it was common in the 1970s and 1980s for many a science chieftain to announce a "breakthrough" for every two-bit import substitution done. If all the claims made by our government-run R&D laboratories about breakthroughs in technology were true, then India by now would have been an economic and technological superpower. Today Paul Ratnasamy, director of NCL and an internationally recognised author­ity on catalysis, is tight-lipped about the work done by his scientists even after they have got US patents.

Incidentally, this approach has not led to a decrease in science at CSIR. In fact, the quality has gone up. Accord­ing to an internal study, even though the number of scientific papers published between 1995 and 1998 remained more or less the same (1,500-1,600 every year), the citation index, which shows how many others are quoting ones paper internation­ally, has gone up by 60 per cent in the same period.

"Dr Mashelkar has brought about a new direction to the management of scientific institutions in India by making their research user oriented with economic benefits. This is path-­breaking. While the team at the helm of CSIR has helped realise the goal, he as an individual has led them as one from within them. This approach makes all the difference," comments Mukesh Ambani.

Molecular hunt
CSIR is quietly starting an ambitious drug discovery programme that capi­talises on the rich biodiversity and millen­nia-old traditional systems of medicine, using the most modern equipment and methods that are leagues ahead of what Indian industry is currently equipped with. Today CSIR has a large number of laborato­ries specialising in chemistry and biology. Moreover, out of the 13 new drugs discov­ered in the last 50 years in India, 10 have resulted from the efforts of CSIR labs, thereby generating a certain level of confi­dence. The bane of CSIR labs however, has been lack of networking and synergising among themselves. In the past many a director has treated his lab as a fiefdom in itself and there have been cases of serious internecine rivalry leading to fragmenta­tion of skills and replication of facilities.

Now 20 CSIR labs spread allover India are being networked for new drug discov­ery. Others outside the CSIR fold have also been co-opted. One example is Arya Vaidya Shala at Kottakkal, Kerala, which is well known for its expertise in Ayurveda. Simi­larly other traditional systems of herbal medicine like Siddha and Rasayana are also being explored. The rich biodiversity of India in terms of plants, fungi, bacteria, marine organisms, and insects are being systemati­cally scoured for novel molecules that might

If CSIR'S New Drug Discovery programme succeeds, it will be an example of success on a shoestring budget. After all, a leading phar­maceutical company like Glaxo-Wellcome spends more than 10 times CSIR'S entire budget for forty odd laboratories!

Sticking the neck out

Within months of becoming director-­general of CSIR in mid-199S, Mashelkar took an extraordinary step. He put down in black and white what he aimed to achieve by 2001 (see table), thereby making CSIR vulnerable to criticism if the goals were not met. In bureaucratic Delhi, where the watch­word is 'cover-your-back', this new secretary to the Government of India broke all rules and actually stuck his neck out! But he was not a general full of bluster without an army. In fact he set out to visit all the 40 labs within three months of taking over, a task not carried out by any recent DG in his entire term! Individual labs soon followed with their own concrete 2001 strategy statements.

CSIR knows that, in the current conditions, it has to fight for every rupee and dollar and see to it that its old clients keep coming back while new ones are added. That's why, in another pioneering move, it is conducting a meticulous customer satisfaction survey among its indus­trial clients to review its own weak­nesses. In an effort to improve systems, more than 10 labs have already received ISO 9000 certification.

It is clear that, while CSIR has defi­nitely moved forward on patenting, it is definitely lagging far behind in its targets for 2001 (see table). So, is Mashelkar ready to reset some of his targets? "The context decides the content. 'CSIR 2001' was visualised in the context of rapid anticipated indus­trial growth. That has not happened. In fact, industry has had a bad reces­sion in the last two years. This has affected us. Although the percentage of income from industry has risen to the desired figure, absolute figures have not been reached," he says.

"The foreign earnings are rising and have come close to $4 million, but any further rise will take time. For example, if the right manpower were available within CSIR, we would earn our targeted $40 million by 2001 from GE itself. So we are paying a lot of attention to recruiting bright young people. Moreover, once the drug research programme takes off, there will be considerable earnings at each milestone reached during drug development.

"Infrastructure projects and espe­cially a large number of bridges are going to be built in the country. CSIR labs like the Central Road Research Institute, the Central Building Research Institute, and SERC can form a consortium and offer design and other consul­tancy,” says Dr Vijay Gupchup.

"However, overemphasis on balancing the laboratory budget has to give way to balancing the national budget. For example, when CSIR brought 270 tanneries back into action in Tamil Nadu through green technologies, it saved an industry with a turnover of Rs2,000-crore-plus, but the direct benefit to CSIR in monetary terms was not even Rs5 crore. So far CSIR has been technology-centred. However, now we are launching a Leather Vision 2010 and driving the industry towards that. Similarly, CSIR will become the nucleus of future civil­ian aircraft industry. We have made a modest beginning with a Hansa licensed to Taneja Aerospace, and we are now taking up the 14-seater multi­purpose aircraft Saras. In less than a year from now, the first prototype will roll out. We are putting in our own money with HAL and Pratt & Whitney as partners. The same can be said about CSIR launching the IPR movement, protection of India's traditional knowl­edge base movement, and so on."

The road to the future

"Do you need all the 40 labs or should some non-performing ones be closed down?" That's a question Mashelkar is often asked. "I do not have 'non­performing assets' in the normal sense of the word. My assets are not plant and machinery. We might have a few non-performing brains. Though we need to be slim and trim, I do not think the answer is closing down labs. What we need to do first is provide leader­ship to the underperforming labs."

He illustrates his assertion with the example of the Central Mining Research Institute, in the badlands of Bihar, right in the midst of the Dhan­bad mafia. Five years ago it was at the bottom in all respects and could have easily been written off. A new director Dr B.B. Dhar came along and turned it around in five years. Today it is in the top 10 in terms of earnings from industry and recently won the CSIR technology award, beating better equipped engineering labs.

At a systemic level Mashelkar's emphasis is on networking, echoing Sun Micro Systems' by now famous declaration "the network is the computer, not individual servers and other components". Projects and new initiatives are being taken up which involve many labs. The New Drug Discovery Initiative is one such involving about 20 labs (see box: mole­cular hunt). Over 500 scientists are involved in searching for new molecules which can become drugs and agrochemicals. "Similarly, the National Metallurgical Laboratory, the National Aerospace Laboratory, the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute, and the Structural Engineering Research Centre (Chen­nai) put together have more expertise than any foreign consultant in the matter of residual life assessment of power plants," says Mashelkar.

"Infrastructure projects and espe­cially a large number of bridges are going to be built in the country. CSIR labs like the Central Road Research Institute, the Central Build­ing Research Institute, and SERC can fmm a consortium and offer design and other consultancy," says Dr Vijay Gupchup, a structural engineer and former Pro Vice Chancellor of Bombay University.

Die-hard optimist

He and his team are showing that science administration is not a cushy position for a retiring scientist; that it needs hardcore management skills. For the first time, after five decades of independent India R&D management has made its appearance as an organi­sational culture. It involves harmonis­ing short-term and long-term goals, and encouraging innovation and creativity, while insisting on deliver­ability and targets, handling tempera­mental scientists on the one hand and hard-nosed businessmen, bankers, and bureaucrats on the other. Natu­rally it surprised nobody when vice­ president Krishan Kant presented the JRD Tata Award for Corporate Leader­ship to Mashelkar in February 1999, even though earlier recipients had been businessmen and bankers: Aditya Birla, Deepak Parekh, and Narayana Murthy. It was a recognition of the fact that CSIR mc had arrived, along with its first CEO.

No wonder the Indian scientific community has chosen him to preside over the first Indian Science Congress of the new millennium, on 3 January 2000. There is no doubt that it will be different, because Mashelkar has left his indelible mark of optimism and businesslike approach on whatever he has taken up.

"I believe in the lilies-in-the-pond story. That is, we should look at the rate of change to see the future. Let us say that lilies double every day and there is one lily in a pond and it takes 30 days to fill the pond. Then on the 29th day the pond will be half full, on the 28th one-fourth full, on the 27th one-eighth full, on the 26th only one ­sixteenth full, and so on. But if you see the rate of growth then you will see that soon it will be full," he replies to his critics.

Managing change requires clear goals, lucid argumentation, empathy, doggedness, faith in your team, opti­mism, and the ability to enthuse others with your dreams and convert them into collective dreams. Mashelkar is doing just that. The boy who had stars in his eyes on the sands of Chowpatty is today filling others with his dream of an India that will be a significant player in global knowledge economics. In the prevailing gloom and cynicism he personifies hope.

Tech Pioneers

Business India, September 17-30, 2001 

  Beyond valuations 

Indians in Silicon Valley aren't famous just for the big bucks they made as hi-tech entrepreneurs - quite a few have made an impact as technology pioneers 

Shivanand Kanavi 

Indians in the United States are down in valuations, but not in value added. Busi­ness India celebrated the success of Indian hi-tech entrepreneurs in the US in a special issue at the start of this year. Many of the Sili­con Valley millionaires then mentioned fell sharply in net worth after the Nasdaq index crashed from 5,000 points in March last year to less than 2,000 points in August this year. But the downturn also separates the men from the boys. We introduce here three individuals who have pioneered technology and entrepre­neurship in diverse fields such as fibre optics, tunable lasers, digital cinematography, optics, biotechnology, microprocessor design and broadband communications and networking. 

  Through the fibre glass 

With his hearty laughter and easygoing nature, the ebullient Dr Narinder Singh Kapany reminds you of a neighbourhood innkeeper. But his appearance misleads. Kapany, at 74, has launched a start-up, K20ptronics, which makes tunable lasers and other components for optical networking. The firm hopes to commercialise products based on state-of-the-art Dense Wave Division Mul­tiplexing technology, patented by Kapany. However, not many people know that Kapany also launched what was perhaps the first hi­tech Indian start-up in the US in 1960 - when Silicon Valley's poster boy, Sabeer Bhatia, was not even born. Kapany's unassuming manner does not indicate that he had demonstrated, for the first time SO years ago, that light could be sent through glass fibre. His path-breaking project, as a PhD student at Imperial College in Lon­don, led to his being called the "father of fibre optics". "From my high-school days, the idea of bending light around the corner was rat­tling in my brain," he says. "When I was at Imperial College in 1951 to take an advanced course in technical optics, I discussed it with my professor, who added some ideas of his own and took it to the Royal Society, which gave me a scholarship to do a PhD." Why the fuss about bending the path of light? The reason is that light normally travels in a straight line. But when light moving through air enters another medium, such as water or glass, part of it bends and is transmit­ted, while the rest is reflected. When the angle of incidence is more than a certain critical angle, light gets totally reflected at the inter­face. Thus, if light has entered a totally inter­nally reflecting pipe, it will be transmitted along the pipe, even if the pipe is bent into various contortions. British scientist John Tyndall had shown in the 19th century that light can travel through a jet of water, even if it's curved. This effect is used in fountains, in which a coloured light source at a fountain­head gives the impression that different coloured water is springing from the fountain. 

However, nobody had succeeded in using glass fibre to transmit light and images. There was even the fear that even if it were possible to pass light through the medium, the signal might suffer a loss on the way and not come out at the other end of the fibre. But Kapany was bent on trying just that. Born in 1927 in Moga, Punjab, Kapany was brought up in Dehradun where his father had settled after retiring from the Royal Air Force. Armed with a BSc in physics, Kapany joined the local ordnance factory. Here he gained experience in designing and making optical instruments. In 1951, Kapany got the chance to study optics at the University of London, and grabbed it. Testing his ideas in a laboratory experi­ment, however, was not easy. He had to get glass fibre drawn. So he went to the then famous Pilkington Glass Company, where he learned how to draw glass fibre to make glass fabric such as fibreglass. The optical quality of the glass was not important to the firm at all. "I took some optical glass (optical glass is pure glass with no bubbles or any kind of impurity) and requested the company to draw some fibre from it. I also told them what I was going to use it for, and they humoured me," recalls Kapany. However, what Pilkington sent a few months later were spools of fibre, made of green glass meant for beer bottles, which was very fragile and almost opaque. "I spent months making bundles of fibre and trying to shine light at one end to see if I could see it at the other end, but no light was coming out. That was because it was not optical glass. So, I had to cut the bundle to short lengths and use strong light from a carbon arc source and finally I was able to demonstrate it in 1952-53," he recalls. By 1955, Kapany completed his doctorate and was all set for a return to India. However, the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester in the US drew him. He decided to go to the US for "one year", and this eventu­ally stretched to nearly 50 years. After Rochester, he went to the Illinois Institute of Technology near Chicago to head the Optics Department. "I did a lot of exciting work there for four years, but did not want to live in Chicago, he says, "So, I came to California and started my first company in 1960 called Optics Technology." Lasers were hot technology at that time. Charles Townes had just demonstrated a Ruby Laser and Ali Javan was building the first helium-neon laser in Bell Labs. Kapany demonstrated that Ruby Lasers could be used for eye surgery. "I made lasers for eye surgery and optical filters and other instrumentation. I took it public in 1967. They were crazy times like we had here in the Valley last year. We were very successful,” recalls Kapany. In 1973, Kapany started another company called Kaptron, built it up and sold it to AMP. This made optical connectors for FDDI (fibre distributed data interface) "I stayed there 10 years as an AMP fellow and developed a num­ber of new technologies and products for them. I left them a year-and-a-half ago and started the present company, K2Optronics. Last year we got two rounds of funding, totalling $42 million. We are making DWDM components, tunable lasers and so on. We specify what we need and buy the chips and produce very high quality lasers for Metropol­itan and Access networks. We have some cut­ting-edge special designs for lasers, which is patented technology. We have a fairly aggres­sive programme,” says Kapany about his latest venture. How does he view the multi-billion dollar industry his inventions have spawned? "In every place a number of friends come up and say accusingly, 'see what you have done,” he guffaws. Kapany has taught in Stanford, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and has published over 100 research papers, besides hold­ing over 125 patents and four books. Besides optics, Kapany is interested in promoting Sikh heritage and culture. His collection of Sikh art has done the rounds in several museums around the world. He is also a patron of the Sikh Foundation in the Silicon Valley, which he founded in 1967. He has generously donated to academia to create a chair in Sikh studies at the Univer­sity of California at Santa Barbara and a chair for optoelectronics at UC Santa Cruz. Besides playing with light, Kapany's hobby is sculpture, and he has had several exhibi­tions of his work. Kapany visits India almost every year and is a keen observer of the fibre­optics scene here. 

  

Seamless vision 

One would think Bala Manian, who lost an eye in childhood in a ghastly accident while playing with a sharp compass from his school geometry box, is limited in his vision. But that would be only physically true. He is probably one of the most versatile entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley. Digital cinematography, opti­cal imaging, bioinfomatics and biomedical instrumentation are his playgrounds. In the last 20 years, he has created seven successful start-ups in as many different fields of tech­nology. Manian who is a mechanical engineer by training, is the closest one gets to an 18th century French encyclopaedist in a Valley full of frenetic people with narrow vision and a QSQT - quarter-se-quarter tak - approach to life. When Business India met him at his home in the Valley, he was preparing to visit India and speak to biologists and computer science experts here on the new opportunities in cre­ating an information infrastructure for biolog­ical discovery. "Today, by the term bioinfomatics, is understood genome sequencing and protein sequencing. Actually it is much more than that. It is pattern recog­nition. But there are too many people who talk the talk and very few who walk the walk," says Manian, who cannot suffer shallow con­versationalists. "I will see if I can interest some people in it. It needs a confluence of under­standing, of data mining, pattern recognition, clustering algorithms and biology. The cost advantage of doing this in India is clear to everybody. But I have been away from India for 35 years and 1 call myself an NRI - Non Relevant Indian. For me to assume that just because I am of Indian origin, I know what needs to be done in India in the sphere of pol­icy formulation, is presumptuous. As it is, there are too many people going there and pontificating. However, what needs to be done technologically is very clear to me." "I want to illustrate that even though I am a mechanical engineer, I did the whole cell analysis. I did not have biology background, but I did not hesitate. People need to shed fear. Also, they need to focus on what they can do better, since there are so many things one could do. The window of time that is available to you in this life is small. Fads come and go, but when it comes to science, the only way to succeed is hard work. If I can make these three points, then my trip would have been worth­while," he says. Manian's understanding of novel tech­nologies and their possible commercial exploitation is legendary. In 1978, when he first moved to Silicon Valley, Eugene Kleiner of Kleiner Perkins, the best-known venture capital firm in the Valley, asked him to be a consultant for the firm. When ICICI started the venture capital firm, TDICI, its chairman N. Vaghul, who is Manian's elder brother, asked him to advise TDICI on which ventures to invest in biotechnology. Manian studied physics in Loyola College, Chennai, and graduated in mechanical engineering (instrumentation) from the Madras Institute of Technology in 1967. He wanted to set up a business, but one of his professors advised him to apply to the University of Rochester to study optics. "But Rochester was more interested in laser physics and physical optics than the engineering aspects. Hence, soon after getting my MS, I shifted to Purdue University for my PhD and became the first graduate student in engineering optics," he says. However, Rochester beckoned him after his PhD to set up engineering optics there and he spent the next four years in Rochester. Meanwhile, he got involved in industrial con­sulting for Spectra Physics, a Silicon Valley ­based firm and developed the first portable laser barcode reader for supermarkets. Manian also did a lot of work for the US spy satellite community in Washington on digital imag­ing. Besides establishing Manian as a name to be reckoned with in optics, Rochester also helped him get his soul mate. He married Tas­neem, a Pakistani pediatrician and both moved to the Silicon Valley in 1978. 

 At that time, the Star Wars films from Hol­lywood were gaining immense popularity and set a new dimension in the quality of special effects. Having heard of Manian's reputation in digital optics, George Lukas, director of the Star Wars series and founder of Industrial Light and Magic, approached him to develop new digital special effects technology. That led to Pixar. Manian developed the first three-­colour input-output device to take live scenes, digitise them, put special effects, and put them back on film. These effects were used in Indiana Jones-The Last Crusade, The Return of the Jedi and The Adventures ot Young Sherlock Holmes. The Motion Picture Academy, which awards Oscars in Hollywood, honoured Man­ian with a special award for his technical con­tribution to digital cinematography during the 1999 Oscar ceremony. Manian goes to the roots of a technology, sees its possible applications elsewhere, and does not see any borders in his way. This abil­ity to cross boundaries took him into medical imaging. "In those days, CT scan and MRI images had enormous depth in terms of dynamic range. But doctors had to take pho­tographs from CRT monitors, which had poor resolution," he says. "I took the technology that I had developed for Lucas' films and for the army for digital reconnaissance satellites and developed the first laser film recorder for medical imaging. I worked with Kodak on that. I took digital images and printed them directly on film without going through the CRT, so all intermediate degradation in image quality was avoided." "At the time, I was approached by a new start-up called Adobe, to see if I could apply it in the printing industry. But then Cannon came up with a laser printer, so I saw no point in getting into it," he recalls, "So I focused on medical applications, In 1980 I started Digital Optics Corporation and that was acquired in 1984 by Matrix, which was later acquired by Bayer-Agfa, Gene Kleiner told me that time: 'This is not your first or last idea, so you should go ahead and sell the company: He opened up doors for me, I provided venture capitalists with free consulting. Within two years I found something else to do. I had two ideas in life sciences, and thus started two companies simultaneously. One was Molecu­lar Dynamics, which developed the most suc­cessful product, called storage phosphor technology, which is used in radiography. It used a radioactively-labelled phosphor in radioimmunoassay, animal studies of drugs, and also in genetics as a marker. The other company was called Lumisys. It did the oppo­site of what I did in Digital Optics. I knew wideband communications was coming, so community hospitals, which do not have radi­ology experts should be able to digitise x-ray photographs and send them to experts through modems. Lumisys quickly captured the market for film digitisers. This is called telemedicine today. Lumisys went public in 1995 and Kodak acquired it in 2000. Molecu­lar Dynamics, which had gone public in 1993, was acquired in 199R by Amersham-Pharma­cia Biotech." Bala started Biometric Imaging in 1993, which was subsequently acquired by Becton Dickinson. Biometric Imaging's technology can make thousands of measurements in a blood sample. In 1999, Manian came across a technology from MIT and Berkeley (the original work was done at Bell Labs) relating to nanocrystals, which showed that when very small semicon­ductor crystals developed some very interest­ing optical properties - they emit coloured light when light is shone on them, just like dyes do. However, while dyes bleach in a short time, nanocrystals do not. This property makes them useful as markers in studying a biological process in situ. "We can send them inside a cell and see what is happening - did the gene get activated by what I am doing, is there a message there, am I able to detect RNA? Is it expressing cytokine, (a small molecule that plays a role in cell-to-cell communica­tion)? If I put a cytokine, is it activating the cell? Now I can put thousands of them in a small bead, which is only two microns (micron is a thou­sandth of a millime­tre) in size, and use it as a sort of barcode and then follow that individual bead. I can uniquely identify that head," says an excited Manian. And that marked the birth of a hot new start-up called Quantum Dots Corp. Manian, the serial entrepreneur-cum-­scientist, holds 35 patents and has about 30 research papers to his credit. "Unlike most other entrepreneurs you have met, I don't go and start companies. I find a solution to a problem then I use a company as a way to implement the idea. Even though I am the chairman of the company, I can go and sit with somebody in the lab and go to the com­ponent level in hardware or check the soft­ware code. I en joy all that. In a lot of ways my approach to entrepreneurship is different from most others," he says. All his companies are a driving distance from his home. His main preoccupation now is how to apply the information that science has, to biological discovery. He says science is generating islands of information and likens the situation to a Tamil proverb that says five blind men in a room with an elephant will each come up with differing pictures of the beast, depending on which part of it they touch. "People who work on SNI', proteomics and clinical informatics are looking at differ­ent parts," he explains. "I believe the next decade is going to be, not one of new discover­ies, but of putting it all together and seeking connections. In order to make big strides we have to shed the Pavlov mentality. We have a tendency to do what is being done in Univer­sity of Pennsylvania or some other place. Somebody has to break out of this and leap frog either from the clinical side or from the basic biology side. There is a great opportunity to recognise multi-dimensional data and begin to see patterns in it and there is no better machine than the human mind for that. That is how IT and biology have to converge." His wife Tasneem has stopped practicing medicine and is very active in a support net­work for victims of domestic violence. Manian is on the board of trustees of the University of Rochester. "I want to figure out how to give back to India in education, instead of sitting here and pontificating," he says. We hope Indian universities, CSIR Labs and the Depart­ment of Biotechnology are listening. 

  The Raza of semiconductors 

If one needs an example of enlightened India­-Pakistan cooperation in the hi-tech Silicon Valley, then one need look no further than Atiq Raza of Raza Foundries. Unlike Kapany and Manian, Raza is not a pioneer in technol­ogy but one of the first to have ventured into the semi-conductor business, taken on giants such as Intel and given Indian and Pakistani engineers a break in his ventures. "I have been playing a role in the hi-tech industry much before virtually any Indian arrived on the scene," says Raza. "During that time there was a tendency among some Indi­ans who were beginning to move up, to dis­tance themselves from other Indians. They probably thought that it would appear parochial. For me, exposure to Indian profes­sionals had shown that they are very good. So when Nexgen happened, there were enough Indians coming out of IITS and other colleges and from the industry here and they appeared to be the cream of the crop. In Nexgen we made no differentiation between somebody who came from the Indian subcontinent or outside. One of the earliest cases of an immi­grant-friendly environment was in Nexgen, Rajvir Singh and Vinod Dham were all part of it. Between 25 and 30 per cent of the engineers were Indian. Many of them have gone up and become extremely successful and have remained very close to me." "We also created TiE (The IndUS Entrepre­neurs) organisation with Kanwal Rekhi, Suhas Patil and Prabhu Goel taking an active role. I was not that active, but I emphasised that there should be no dividing line between Indi­ans and Pakistanis. Whenever a Pakistani came to me, I told them also that we should remain completely united with Indian organi­sations and that is the way I have operated for the last 22 years in the United States. Most of the people who have known me have seen my consistent stand," he says. Recently, when Arjun Gupta, of Telesoft Partners, a venture capitalist firm, wanted a Pakistani expatriate to partner him to fund a project in Stanford University on how to reduce military tension and nuclear risk between India and Pakistan, he called Raza and got instant co-operation. "I did not fully understand the project until later, but I had enough faith in Arjun's values and judgement and so I signed up," says Raza. 

 His own value system has its roots back in the subcontinent. His family hails from Alla­habad but his father, who was a brilliant radio engineer, though not formally trained as one, had settled in Lahore for health reasons. Raza was born in Lahore and when after Partition the family returned to Allahabad, they saw their home had been commandeered for refugee rehabilitation. Instead of entering into a dispute to get their home back, the family migrated to Lahore for good. Raza studied physics and philosophy simultaneously at two colleges of Punjab University. His interest in philosophy was kindled by his maths teacher in Aitchison College, a many-splendoured personality, who knew Sanskrit and Persian and had read the Upanishads and the Mahab­harata and the Ramayana in the original. Raza then went to the Imperial College in London to study electrical engineering. Unlike most of his peers, he felt obliged to give something back to the country he was born in, and went back to Pakistan in 1972 where he joined the Telephone Industries of Pakistan, Raza worked there for six years, but he saw the social fabric being increasingly taken over by extremists. "The liberal in Raza made him spend his spare time in the slums of Lahore after office hours, trying to help people out. He used to be called "masterji", since he was teaching them how to fill forms or fight for some basic services. But he started seeing Pakistan spin out of control into the hands of fundamentalists and armed groups of all sorts, and migrated to the US with his wife and child in 1978. He joined the University of Oregon and then later Stoanford University, for a mas­ters in electrical engineering. Soon after his graduation, he joined Syner­getics and then Trilogy and later VLSI Tech­nologies. When he was ready to take over as the chief executive officer of the US operations of a European semi-conductor company, Rajvir Singh came to him and asked him to join Nexgen as vice-president, engineering. Nexgen was a pioneering Indian start-up in 1987 in computer hardware, founded by Thampy Thomas. However, its business plan of making clones of Intel 386 processors and making pcs around it was not succeeding. Raza, who grew to be chairman and CEO of the company, changed the business plan. They started focusing on microprocessor design. Nexgen went public and its technology was coveted by another chipmaker AMD, which was struggling against Intel. AMD acquired Nexgen for $615 million in 1995. Raza became the president and coo of hamd and was the prime driver behind its new generation of chips: K6, K7 or Athlon. Their success made Intel see competition for the first time. “The foundation that has been built in AMD is quite solid and will bother Intel for a long time. Andy Grove used to call AMD the 'Milli-Vanelli of the chip industry who were lip-synchers and not singers, but today AMD is very strong,” says Raza. However, in 1999 Raza had enough of AMD. His long-time friend Vinod Dham had left AMD in 1998 and joined a start-up, Silicon Spice, as CEO. Silicon Spice (it was acquired last year by Broadcom for a stock swap worth $1.2 billion) was trying to make broadband chips. At that point, another start-up was com­ing into being in the same space. This was called Vxtel, and was funded by Arjun Gupta's Telesoft Partners. Raza too had invested some money in Vxtel. Arjun Gupta asked Raza to run the company, and Raza accepted. "Vinod is a good friend and a highly competitive guy," says Raza. "But I saw that he was burdened with legacy issues at Silicon Spice, whereas we had a clean slate, so I had a better chance of succeeding" explains Raza. Consequently, when Vxtel produced its chips, Intel acquired it in February this year for $550 million in cash. The deal has shown that even in a down­turn when many start-ups have shut down, there is demand for high technology. "I had seen what happened in the case of Silicon Spice-Broadcom deal (the stock of Broadcom has slid down so much that the acquisition is valued at less than $200 million today). So when Intel offered us stock and many of my board members were ready to accept it gladly, I put my foot down and insisted on cash," recalls Raza. Raza has always encouraged other hi-tech entrepreneurs. When Rajvir Singh was trying to raise a million dollars for his Redwood Ven­tures fund, Raza was the first to write a cheque for $100,000 while being dropped to the airport. Today Raza wants to set up more start-ups than just become a venture capitalist. So, he has started an incubator called Raza Foundries. “lt has a holding company struc­ture where you not only invest, but support start-ups. We are concentrating on broadband networking communication products. If you ask people in the venture capitalist commu­nity, they speak reasonably well of us. We do not incubate companies, but we invest in strong start-ups and then grow them. Cisco has invested $60 million in us, Broadcom $10 million, AMCC $10 million, PMC sierra $10 million, Electralogic $10 million, Siemens and Infineon $12 million. They want an introduc­tion to the companies we invest in and strate­gic partnership. They would like to have early access to products, and may be strategic acquisitions. We are now treated on par with large corporations in the chip industry," explains Raza. Going back to his pet theme of subconti­nental cooperation, Raza says, “Clearly, we need statesmen and not politicians. Today there may be more statesmen in India than Pakistan. If we build these bridges, and the statesmen establish their vision, most of the differences will disappear. It is the most nat­ural alliance and I was telling Pakistan's ambassador to UN that these 22 years I have not understood the division and I did not understand it when I was in Pakistan too. Every time I run into Pakistanis, I tell them that it is an artificial boundary and it can be at least reduced in its sharpness," says Raza. We say, may his tribe increase. When the history of high technology is written, the boom and bust of the past five years will appear as a blip. But the contribu­tion made by Indian technologists and entre­preneurs in inventing new technology and successfully commercialising it, will have sev­eral luminaries listed. The three we have pro­filed here are definitely part of that select group.

Medicine-Rheumatoid Arthritis

Business India, October 15-28,2001

More than a cure

Rheumatoid arthritis is increasingly being recognised as a crippling disease which affects nearly one crore Indians

Shivanand Kanavi

Anthrax hogs the headlines and cardiovascular diseases and can­cer hog the research dollars, but a crip­pling disease affecting 60 million people is blissfully neglected or assigned to cold bones and old age. That in short is the story of rheuma­toid arthritis. That is why WHO has announced 12 October as World Arthritis Day and will further this decade as the Bone and Joint Decade.

In a series of conferences in Mum­bai on 11 and 12 October organised by Aventis Pharma, several well-known clinical experts from the Indian League of Rheumatology Associations did their best to educate the public about this affliction. According to Prof. A.N. Malviya, former professor at AIIMS Delhi and a world-renowned rheumatologist, rheumatoid arthri­tis (RA) is a highly neglected disease. Even though in a survey done in Ballabgarh semi-urban area near Delhi with a sample set of 39, 000 people, his team found 0.75 per cent afflicted by RA, on a national scale that works out to a massive 75 lakh!



Symptoms:
Pain and aching in and around the joints, particularly hands, feet and knees
Morning stiffness
Swelling of joints
Persistent fatigue and run-down feeling
Muscle weakness and decreased physical activity
Inability to sleep due to painful joints


The disease affects women primar­ily (female-male ratio is 3: 1) and can occur at all ages, though it is more common post-menopause. Since the 1980s it has also been recognised that besides deforming her beyond repair, RA is serious enough to reduce the life of a patient by 5-8 years.

The cause of RA has not been understood, but it is recognised as one auto-immune diseases, In plain English it means the body's immune system, which is supposed to differen­tiate between "self" and "non-self' (harmful foreign bodies like bacteria and viruses) gets confused and starts attacking "self" (its own cells). In RA the T- and B-cells (part of body's defences) start attacking the syn­ovium or joint lining (see figure). The synovium gets inflamed and thick­ened, producing large volumes of sinovial fluid. This causes pain, stiff­ness, and swelling. When this process is chronic, severe proteins are released, which damage the nearby cartilage and bone, causing erosion. This leads to joint damage, instability, and deformity.

Belatedly its seriousness has come to light. In fact there are just a hand­ful of doctors in India who practice rheumatology exclusively. There are several physicians-cum-rheumatolo­gists and fairly large number of orthopaedics treating the disease. Malviya stresses that educating doc­tors about the disease is almost as important as educating patients. The most common treatment for RA over the years has been to give the patient painkillers and non-steroidal anti­inflammatory drugs like paracetamol, ibuprofen, or the more modern Cox II types, which do not damage the intestines. Malviya prefers to call them "plain killers.” "The disease is surprisingly aggressive. It is not a pro­tracted degenerative disease. If treated within six weeks it can almost surely be arrested. If treated within three months there are good chances, though some damage will have set in. But if delayed any further the damage becomes irreversible," he says. That is why painkillers which just reduce pain and give temporary relief give the patient the impression that every­thing is okay while irreversible dam­age is being done beneath the surface.

In the last few decades several drugs have been found to have a very good effect in arresting RA, though they were not initially discovered for that purpose, For example chloro­quine, an anti-malarial drug, has been found to have very good effect on RA, in addition to being not expensive. Methotrexate, an anti-cancer drug, has been successfully used against RA and is the most popular treatment today. Malviya, who was one of the pioneers in developing methotrexate therapy, finds it the most effective in combination with other drugs. Sul­fasalazine, a drug meant for a bowel disease, has also been found effective against RA.

What these drugs do is affect the rates at which cells divide by interfer­ing in purine metabolism, a necessary step in DNA production - a much-­needed raw material for cell division. Now when an autoimmune disease like RA has set in, the body produces too many warriors to fight itself. By reducing cell division, the growth of T- and B-cells is also arrested and hence the beneficiary effect for a RA patient. But the drugs have other side-effects and cannot differentiate between a T-cell and any other cell. Thus, all cell division gets arrested. In fact anti-cancer drugs act in this indis­criminate way and stop the growth of cancerous cells along with healthy cells, leading to severe side-effects in patients undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. One definite precaution to be taken in this therapy is that though the disease affects women more than men, they should not be pregnant since the growth of the foetus also involves intense cell division.

A drug targeted to arrest RA has recently been developed by Aventis Pharma. Leflunomide (trade name Arava) was launched in India on World Arthritis Day. This is a new­-generation drug targeted at arresting lymphocyte division by largely inter­fering in pyrimidine metabolism. It has been found to have an excellent effect on patients in a very short time. However, the drug remains in the sys­tem for a long time and does not get expelled through excretion easily. Thus, women planning on conception should inform their doctor of the same so that he can give them addi­tional drugs to flush leflunomide out from the system. which can take a few weeks. So far, leflunomide used to be smuggled into India from Thailand and costs about Rs150-200 per daily dose. However, Aventis is planning to introduce it at about Rs40.

There are also extremely effective biologicals (products of biotechnol­ogy) which cost from Rs60.000 a dose to Rs 4.5 lakh. A major concern in this segment is the 56 per cent customs duty that has to be paid and then all the local taxes. Since imports are in small quantities and the government does not really earn much money from this high duty. if these drugs are made duty-free then thousands of RA patients will get some relief from pain to their pockets as well!

Interestingly, as one of those won­ders of nature, though RA patients cannot take any of the above-men­tioned disease-modifying treatments during pregnancy, the body itself arrests RA and there is a temporary remission!

"The main problem today is edu­cating the patients and the general population," says Dr K.M. Mahin­dranath, a renowned rheumatologist from Bangalore and president-elect of the Indian Rheumatology Associa­tion. "Since it mostly affects women, the initial symptoms of prolonged morning stiffness are taken as a sign of laziness by family members. Then, as the patient loses control over her fingers and starts dropping things she will be called clumsy and when she becomes sloppy and cannot even dress herself properly she stops going out and becomes a recluse. This in turn leads to depression, which wors­ens the problem. What is needed is proper counselling and encourage­ment to engage in appropriate physi­cal therapy and other exercises. in addition to drugs." he adds. He welcomes Aventis's initiative In this regard through its newly launched "joint Effort" - where Aventis facili­tates communication between the physician and patient using its own network of 200 medical representa­tives and 10 trained counsellors.

"We have exclusive marketing rights for Arava in Europe and North America, but owing to the IPR regime in India we do not enjoy any protec­tion here. Therefore, it is to be expected that this drug, which in a short period of two years has reached sales of $250 million will be copied by some Indian companies and introduced in the Indian market. But there are two issues. Firstly, the drug has to be produced in extremely controlled conditions where there are no women workers and where no other drug is produced. If the authorities here insist on these manufacturing practices, I doubt anybody will qualify, consider­ing that today only one factory in France supplies to the whole world and a new factory only to serve the small Indian market does not make economic sense. Secondly, RA therapy is more than just drugs. It means counseling, communication, and actually building a long-term rela­tionship with the patient of which our Joint Effort will be a key compo­nent. I seriously doubt if any other company will invest in this." says Aventis CEO Ramesh Subramaniam.

But there are researchers who are trying to find out in detail how herbal drug therapies work using tools of modern medicine. C.N. Qazi, director of the Jammu Regional Research Lab­oratory of CSIR, and his predecessor S.S. Handa are two of this breed. Handa started work on boswellic acid extracted from the gum produced by the tree Boswellia sarata found in the forests of Madhya Pradesh. The bene­ficial effects of these guguls and gums for arthritis are cited in ayurveda. Handa studied the anti-inflammatory character of boswallic acids exten­sively over the last two decades. The standardised boswellian extract is being marketed by Gufic Laboratories under the brand name Salaki.

Qazi has picked up where Handa left off. He studied the other fractions in the extract and found those that are not just anti-inflammatory but actually immuno-modulatory in nature. The method of extraction, preparation, and use of these com­pounds have been patented by CSIR in Europe and the US, and animal trials too have been conducted with no toxic effect. Human trials are still to be done, but since herbal medicine does not require human trials, CSIR is negotiating with some companies to market these Immunomodulatory extracts, which have been effective in the arrest of arthritis. The research has generated a lot of interest internation­ally and this CSIR laboratory is getting a lot of snail mail and e-mail.

Special Report-India US and Tarapur

Business India, October 25-November 7, 1993

Fuel for Controversy

The nuclear energy industry finds itself in an impossible situation strapped as it is for both fuel and funds. It has survived against great odds and could do much more in terms of energy generation if things improved.

Shivanand Kanavi

A delegation from the ministry of ex­ternal affairs, which also included the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission returned on 7 October 1993 from Washington after the latest round of discussions with their US counterparts. The members of the team didn't have much to celebrate on their return, for negotiations between India and US continue to be dead­locked over the issue of Tarapur fuel.

Meanwhile, on 24 October 1993, the treaty between India and US for nuclear co­operation, that involved the setting up of two Boiling Water Reactors and supply of low enriched uranium (2.4 per cent U235), expires. The 30-year-old treaty has seen many ups and downs in Indo-US relations in the field of nuclear energy, which started with co-operation but are now bogged down in contentious negotiations, if not outright confrontation.

Under the agreement, after calling for global tenders General Electric, the US built two Boiling Water Reactors, each capable of producing 210 mw of electricity. The two reactors went critical in February 1969 and commercial operations began on 28 October 1969.

Following the Pokharan blast in 1974, and the passing of Nuclear Non-prolifera­tion Act by the US congress in 1978, Tara­pur faced severe problem regarding spares as the US placed an embargo. This led to the Tarapur reactors getting downgraded from 210 mw to 160 mw.

The US applied the 1978 Act retroac­tively and stopped fuel supply from 1983, ten years before the contractual obligations ended. The reactors require 40 tonnes of fuel each. Ten tonnes of it need to be changed every 18 months. The spent fuel if chemically processed, this highly radioac­tive waste will yield Plutonium 239. This isotope of plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons or to run a nuclear reactor. Hence, the spent fuel in nuclear industry attracts more attention than the actual fuel itself.

To prevent misuse of this plutonium for a weapons programme, a strict accounting procedure has been set up by the Interna­tional Atomic Energy Agency. IAEA in­spectors periodically visit the country and meticulously record the movement of every gram of uranium and plutonium from the fuel assembly stage to storing, loading in the reactor core and storage of spent fuel. In Tarapur reactor they even have two remote controlled cameras continuously video re­cording the fuel elements.

A tripartite agreement was made be­tween India, US and IAEA that the latter will subject Tarapur reactor fuel to safe­guards. The arrangement has worked so far with no friction between IAEA and India, In fact, Hans Blix, director general of IAEA said in Bombay recently, "There have been extremely good relations between Indio and IAEA. Even as the tripartite agreement expires, India and IAEA have entered into 0 bilateral safeguards agreement in anticipation of successful conclusion of a tripartite treaty.

The problem then is with the US. It tried to persuade India to sign the NPT, which would have placed all its nuclear establish­ments, including those built indigenously and supplied with indigenous fuel, under the "safeguards". India has staunchly re­fused to sign the treaty on the grounds that it discriminates between weapon states and others.

R. Chidambaram, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, takes pains to explain that India is not for proliferation 01 nuclear weapons. He says, "India does not agree with NPT in its present form which only seeks to prevent horizontal proliferation while doing noth­ing about vertical proliferation." If the US did not want to com­plete the contract, then India could have exercised its right to remove safeguards from the spent fuel in Tarapur and repro­cessed it in 1983, enabling it to use the recovered plutonium whichever way it wanted.

The US averted such a con­frontation by allowing France to supply the fuel for ten years. The uranium hexafluoride gas that used to come in cylinders from France was converted into uranium dioxide powder at the Nuclear Fuel Complex, Hyderabad. Here it was converted to pellets and loaded into fuel rods made of zirconium alloy. This was a major advance in India's fuel fabrication capability from the early days when the entire fuel used to come in the form of fabri­cated fuel rods from the US.

However, in 1992, France also signed the NPT, along with China and South Africa and several others, and brought further pressure on India to put all its installations under full scope safeguards, Since India did not agree to do so, France also did not want to continue the supply after the end of the contract in October 1993.

India has a strong legal case in going ahead with reprocessing the Tarapur fuel and extracting plutonium from it. It has built adequate facilities for the same in Tarapur. Since India has not yet developed large scale uranium enrichment facilities, it wants to run the Tarapur plant with a mix­ture of uranium and plutonium oxides called MOX fuel. Some bundles fabricated with this fuel have already been tested at the Cirus research reactor in Trom­bay. After trying out a couple of bundles in the core of the power reactor, India plans to use MOX bundles on a large scale in 1995.

The present stocks of low enriched uranium will last till then and, in fact, may be another year if managed prudently. India surprised the US team in Wash­ington recently by offering to continue the bilateral safeguards with IAEA for another two months and later conclude an annual agreement regarding the same. "Since the plutonium extracted from Tara­pur is put back into Tarapur under IAEA safeguards, there can be nothing more non­-proliferative and peaceful than this," says Chidambaram.

Atomic energy sources indicate a soft­ening of US stand on reprocessing and are hopeful of an amicable solution to the vexed issue. As a quid pro quo, Bill Clinton's administration seems to be interested in enlisting Indian support to a new proposal to agree to enforce a cut-off on the produc­tion of all weapon grade fissile materials like highly enriched uranium and plutoni­um. Chidambaram says, "We have no ob­jection in principle to this since it does not affect our peaceful nuclear energy pro­gramme and, for the first time, sounds non- discriminatory between wea­pon states and non-weapon states. However, we have yet to see the detailed proposal."

The international confer­ence to review NPT is coming up in 1995 and it is possible that with the current push be­ing given by the Clinton administration towards vol­untary moratoriums on tests and other confidence building measures, reduction of tension in West Asia, etc, there may be a wider consensus on how to achieve non-proliferation and an agenda for gradual disar­mament. If such a thing does come into being, then India might have very little moral justification for not signing the NPT in its new avatar.

Indian strategy to be energy indepen­dent and the embargoes imposed on transfer of nuclear technology to India after Pokha­ran, led to considerable development of indigenous capabilities in instrumentation and adaptation of the Canadian Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor technology.

However, from a plant engineers' point of view, Boiling Water Reactors are much easier to operate, Though Tarapur itself was state-of-the-art in BWRs in the '60s, by now six new generations of BWRs have come out and none of the original genera­tion are still working in the world except at Tarapur. The reason is that while BWR-I had a capacity of 210mw the present BWR-6 are advanced in every way be­sides producing 900 mw to 1,100 mw.

Due to the technology em­bargo India has totally missed these developments, It is the sheer ingenuity of Indian nu­clear engineers that has led to upgradation of Tarapur to BWR-3 level in various re­spects, Besides, while MOX will get rid of the problem of storing highly toxic plutoni­um, the already downgraded Tarapur reactor will be further downgraded power wise since the loading cycle for MOX is much shorter (nine months instead of the existing 18 months), thereby leading to further loss of generation.

Interestingly, the rest of the BWR-I s were shut down not because of any inherent design problems or accidents but due to the fact that operating costs for a 100 mw plant of that generation are nearly the same as that for a 1,000 mw plant. They proved uneconomical. However, in an energy-starved India, 320 mw is 320 mw.

The bane of Tarapur, as with the rest of nuclear power programme, has not been technology, but the tariff structure. As K. Nanjundeswaran, exec­utive director, corporate planning and co-ordina­tion, of the Nuclear Power Corporation, ex­claims. "If we are not given a rational tariff structure that will help us generate funds f(x plant modernisation and ex­pansion, then it be­comes meaningless to say that the govern­ment will not give us budgetary support and we have to expand based on internal re­sources."

B.K. Bhasin, chief superintendent at Tara­pur, is proud that the once barren industrial landscape of Tarapur is now filled with over 1,500 medium and small scale industries involving an invest­ment of over Rs.2,000 crore. At the same time, he rues the fact that the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, which pays 57 paise per unit to Tarapur, then sells it outside the plant gate at Rs. 1.75 to the adjoining indus­trial units. Says Bhasin, “The whole ap­proach towards power product ion has been altruistic. It is not based on economics leave alone market economics. After all, when we started production we were forced to sell power to Gujarat and Maharashtra at the rate 01'5 paise per unit. In those days, at least there was budgetary support. But in today's atmosphere of lessening state intervention in all fields, which translates to no budget­ary support to PSUs, how can we continue the same policy?"

S.K. Chatterjee, managing director of the NPC. claims that dues from the SEBs now stand at Rs.530 crore. Thermal power companies gets World Bank loans, but not nuclear power companies. "If we have to borrow from the market at the high interest rates prevailing and then, considering the world average of 7 to 8 years for the con­struction of a nuclear power plant, there is no way I can expand. Already a number of my projects are stuck for lack of funds," says Chatterjee.

He adds, "The Tarapur story does not end with reactors 1 and 2 or MOX. The next stage of reactors 3 and 4 will be the first 500 MW Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor that will use natural uranium as fuel. The reactor design group in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre has designed the new reactor and the main elements of the reactor have already been constructed by L& T and Walchandna­gar and others. The land is being acquired next to reactors I and 2 and the infrastruc­ture built for the new reactors is already in place. At such a moment, when one can reap the benefits of earlier investments in build­ing the infrastructure from scratch, for a modern nuclear power station, the corpora­tion is strapped for funds. It is very frustrat­ing." Chatterjee, incidentally, shared the excitement in the Golden Age of nuclear energy in India in the '50s and '60s, with Bhabha and others.

"I need about 3,000 mw of generating capacity to start earning profits of the order of Rs. 250 Crore to Rs.300 crore on which I can borrow further and expand," says Chat­terjee. "I need an investment rate of about Rs. 1,000 Crore a year to complete my projects. We have already placed orders and a number of items are ready under the advanced procurement schemes. But due to lack of money now I am stuck."

Having been spawned under the highly secretive Atomic Energy Act that prohibits even the Parliament from probing the De­partment of Atomic Energy too deeply, the atmosphere so far in the DAE has been very complacent. NPC, however is bringing in the first breeze of a corporate culture. Peo­ple in the headquarters or plants and con­struction sites talk frankly without looking over their shoulders.

So what is the way out of this resource crunch? NPC is looking at many options. Strategic Con­sultants, a financial con­sultancy, is working out ways to raise funds. One possibility is to set up separate corporations in the joint sector to operate the Tarapur complex. It would be easier to raise money when there is al­ready some generating capacity and, on top of it, one will get new capacity which will be paid for at new rates. New plants like Kakrapar are paid Rs.2.13 per unit of power.

Whatever be the strategy chosen, 25 years af­ter India's nuclear adventure began, it is clear that with minimal support much more can be done. In recent years, India's nuclear scientists have not been treated like the unalloyed heroes they were in the' 50s and '60s. As Nehru perceptively remarked while inaugurating the Apsara reactor in 1957, "In Greece, there were the mysteries and the high priests, who apparently knew about these mysteries. They exercised a great amount of influence on the common people, who did not understand them. Now we have these mysteries which these high priests of science flourish before us, make us either full of wonder or fear."

The position of the high priests of nucle­ar science has been sullied worldwide af­ter Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Therefore, it is to be expected that they would not get the same adulation as they got before. However, looking at all sides, Indian nu­clear scientists have performed creditably and could perform even better if they lose the bureaucratic outlook that has dogged them for the last 40 odd years.

Special Report--Nuclear Power

Business India, Special Report, April 5-18, 1999

Reaching a Critical Mass

For energy-starved India, nuclear power is proving to be an economic necessity that needs governmental support. Private sector too can get seriously interested in it if long-term debt instruments can be introduced for this sector.

Shivanand Kanavi

The sun rises in the east for nuclear power. No, it is not a -parody of a Maoist hymn of Cultural Revolution vintage. Suddenly things are looking up for nuclear power. And it is mainly due to developments in Asia. How did an industry that was assailed as a "sunset industry" make this turnaround? No new reactors are being built in Germany, US and Nordic countries. But that is a superficial view, because hardly any power units have been added in these energy saturated economies recently and the discovery of cheap gas has led to marginal additions of a few gas-based projects.

But at the turn of the century, power hungry Asian economies are adding thousands of megawatts of nuclear power. South Korea, Japan and China have 15 reactors under construction that will add a handsome 13,000 MW. Another 22,000 MW are being planned for the future (see table Nuclear power programmes in Asia). The primary reason is, like India, these economies are also highly dependent on imported oil and gas. Naturally, they want to diversify their energy sources, so that they would not be caught on the wrong foot, as world fossil fuel reserves deplete in the 21st century. In fact, it has become abundantly clear now that each country has to prepare a long-term energy plan based on its energy reserves and aspirations. There can be no global blueprint.


Nuclear Power Corporation: High Wattage Performance
Particulars 1995-96 1996-97 1997-98 1998-99
Generation 7,983 9,071 9,618 10,189
in million units
Plant load factor 60% 67% 71% 73%
Income in Rs crore 925 1,233 1,285 1,400
Net profit in Rs crore 152 253 267 288
(Source: NPC)

Due to its capital-intensive nature and relatively long project execution time adding heavy interest during construction, some have argued it to be uneconomical. These arguments gained some credence due to teething problems of the early reactors built in India and elsewhere. In India, master­ing a new technology when all outside help was denied, took time. Develop­ing a decent time frame for the manu­facture and erection of complex equipment required new project management skills. Training the nascent Indian industry in learning high precision, zero defect manufac­ture had to be carried out painstak­ingly when there was no great economic incentive to do so.

These efforts have now paid off not only in developing a decent nuclear industry but developing high precision fabricating skills that have come as a boon to engineering companies like L&T, Godrej, Walchandnagar, BHEL, MTAR and others in these days of global competition. The civil construction involved in a nuclear station has also been mastered by companies like Hindusthan Construction and ECC. As newer safety measures are added to make reactors earthquake proof, flood proof, direct air crash proof, and worst case scenarios are added new sturdier designs are being made of containment domes involving pre-stressing. Some of these have taken time to fall into place. For example, the pre-stressed inner containment dome at Kaiga station of the Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC) under construction partially collapsed due to certain design errors. Failure analysis, design reviews took almost three years and the new design needed the use of high performance concrete (M-60) which had never been used in India before. The developmental work took away valuable money and time. But once it was done the domes at Kaiga and Rajasthan for four new reactors under construction have come up in breathtaking time. Two reactors are undergoing final tests before fuelling and going critical in July 1999. Two more will do the same in 2000. The operational engineers at NPC also had to get focused and learn to operate power stations at high capacity factors while taking care of safety inspections and procedures. Today they have shown that they can do it. The long dark night seems to be over for Indian nuclear power.

"My chief focus after I took over has been to constantly remind the opera­tional team that in the final analysis we are a utility company and as such our performance will be judged by how much and how safely are we producing power. That is what has led to continu­ously rising capacity factors in all our plants. What the company needed was clarity of roles, stress on manpower training and stress on achieving targets .. Once that was brought in, all stations are performing excellently," says Y.S.R. Prasad, chairman and managing direc­tor of NPC. This approach has mattered a lot. What is going to convince the government to allocate funds to this sector is finally hard-boiled economics. After all the projections are done and strategic energy plans are discussed threadbare, one has to look at profits and return on investments.

NPC has consistently performed well in the last three years and might yield a net profit of over Rs325 crore on a slim base of 1,820 MW and that too from power that is sold for 82 paise per unit at Tarapur to Rs2.50 at Kakrapar. NPC has thereby become the envy of other power utility companies in public or private sector. (see table High Wattage Performance)

Today India's meagre oil resources are under tremendous pressure. Bombay High production has fallen in this decade and no new fields have been discovered. In fact the pressure to produce more oil in the 1980s led to flogging the wells regardless of prudent reservoir management. This led to alarming rise in gas to oil ratio and water to oil ratio. As better sense prevailed production came down from 21 million tonnes in 1986 to 14 million tonnes in 1992-93. Only the commis­sioning of Neelam fields led oil produc­tion to rise back to 18 million tonnes in 1996. It is clear, however, that even to get oil at this level the fields have to be nursed properly using better oil recov­ery methods.

Nuclear power programmes In Asia





(as of Dec 31, 1996)
Country In operation Under construction Planned Total

China 2.3 GW 3.2 GW 7.2 GW 12.7 GW
India 1.8 1.9 4.9 7.6
Indonesia 0 0 1.8 1.8
Japan 42.7 3.6 6 52.3
N.Korea 0 0 2 2
Pakistan 0.1 0.3 1.5 1.9
S.Korea 9.6 6.1 8.2 23.9
Taiwan 5.1 0 2.7 7.8
Total 61.6 14.8 34.3 109.9

(Source: "'Nuclear Energy in Asia's Power Sector' - The Atlantic Council, December 1997)


The situation with coal is blacker.
The quality of coal is getting worse. The ash content has reached 40 per cent in many mines which led a wit to remark that if the ash content crosses SO per cent Coal India may have to be renamed as Ash India. The higher ash content is leading to increasing cost of beneficiation (reducing ash content by washing the coal) and thus fuel cost. In a coal-based thermal power plant a major share of cost of power comes from the fuel. Thus thermal power is becoming more expensive. Even then ash content in coal used in thermal power stations is large enough to create serious environmental problems. lf one uses imported South African and Australian coal which has much higher calorific content, as many steel makers are doing, then there are other prob­lems. Such coal has higher sulfur content and there is the additional cost of installing proper anti-pollution equipment, so that environmentally harmful nitrogen and sulfur oxides, that cause acid rain, are not poured into the atmosphere.

There is growing concern about greenhouse gases disturbing global weather. Some scientists are already postulating that it is not a distant prospect, but that the unusual weather patterns found recently are a direct result of global warming. In OECD countries there are serious moves to impose carbon tax of about $130 per tonne of carbon added to the atmos­phere on polluting industries. lf such moves continue then even in devel­oped economies coal-based power will become 50-100 per cent costlier while combined cycle gas-based power will become 25-50 per cent more expensive.

Nuclear power stations however are already sticking to international radia­tion emission norms and the costs of waste disposal are included in the project cost. Thus increasingly the balance is tilting in favour of nuclear energy. What was once considered as a future option in the 21st century is fast becoming an option here and now. In energy starved India's case, where the nation would have to start paying elec­tricity bills in dollars to independent power producers like Enron, nuclear power stations built in India will not only provide jobs but will consume Indian fuel which will not be linked to the exchange rate. Thus, economic logic heavily favours more investment in nuclear power.

This realisation is sinking in govern­ment circles as well. In a report titled 'Generating Capacity Planning Studies in India' dated November 1998 the Central Electricity Authority has recommended an addition of about 5,000 MW each of nuclear power in the Ninth and Tenth Plan periods. An opti­mal capacity mix proposed in the report for thermal hydro and nuclear is63 per cent, 32 per cent and 5 per cent respectively.

The main problem nuclear power faces is high capital cost. There is the additional problem of no soft loans available from the World Bank as is true for thermal power. Debt raised from the market is not long term enough besides being expensive. "The borrowing with maturity period less than 10 years puts pressure on the liquidity position of the company as repayment obligations occur in the initial phases of the opera­tion," says Prasad. "The only way out is to introduce long-term debt instru­ments," he adds.


A study done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, shows that at a discount rate of 5 per cent (without considering carbon tax and other environmental taxes), nuclear can easily compete with thermal power whereas at a discount rate of 10 per cent thermal becomes more competitive. A more detailed study done by NPC, for 2x500 MW nuclear and thermal units (at a distance of over 1,200 km from pit­head western and southern India, which would be commercially avail­able in 2004-05 AD, assuming 1997-98 price level) nuclear power will be cheaper at 5 per cent discount and will level with thermal only at 6.7 per cent. This shows that higher capital cost is the main problem with nuclear power as it is known that fuel costs are anywhere between 12-17 per cent for nuclear while they are as high as 40-50 per cent for thermal. Moreover coal prices are likely to go up faster than nuclear fuel prices in the future.

Though Electricite de France and Modis had publicised their intention of entering the Indian nuclear power sector, no serious proposal seems to have reached the Department of Atomic Energy. This has also been confirmed by R. Chidambaram, chairman, Atomic Energy Commis­sion. "We would like to investigate the possibility of joint ventures but prob­lems will continue till long-term soft debt is not available to this important section of energy infrastructure," says Prasad. It is clear that such instruments cannot come into being from funds available to banks and financial institu­tions. Only when insurance companies and provident fund trusts are allowed to invest in such infrastructure projects can long-term cheap funds flow into nuclear power. Then NPC'S technology and operating experience, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board's supervision, private sector's better project manage­ment skills can all blend into a highly efficient nuclear power programme.

Major industrial disasters like Bhopal and Chernobyl in the 1980s swung public perception from the blind faith (of the 1950s and the 1960s) in scientists to bursts of irrationalism and anti-science. Peddling "alternate this" and" alternate that" became fash­ionable and later even big business.

Many well meaning souls forgot that the standard of living achieved by a fairly large section of people on this planet and aspired to by an even larger number of people especially in Asia and the developing world, requires large scale industrialisation and highly interdependent social production, which in turn needs abundant energy. At the end of 1990s, economic realities are sinking in and safety features in nuclear reactors too have greatly improved. It goes without saying that unlike Europe and North America's industrial revolutions, which were environmentally dirty, the newly industrialising Asia could leapfrog into more environmentally benign technologies. Nuclear power is proving to be one of them.

All that you never wanted to know about Nuclear Engineering

• Fission: Splitting heavy nucleus of say uranium using a slow neutron to "produce smaller daughter nuclei, plenty of energy and many more' neutrons.
• Chain reaction: If the fission of a single nucleus can produce one more neutron which can be used to split another nucleus and so on, then the reaction can be self-sustaining and is called a chain reaction ..
• Isotope: A chemically identical form of an element but with slightly differ­ent atomic mass. like U 233, U 235 and U238'
• Heavy water: Hydrogen has a heavier isotope called deuterium. Water formed by combining heavy hydrogen and oxygen instead of ordinary hydrogen is called heavy water.
• Moderator: A material such as ordi­nary water, heavy water or graphite that is used in a reactor to slow down fast neutrons thus enhancing the fission rate.
• Uranium: The heaviest element normally found in nature. It has three main isotopes: U 233 - a fissile mater­ial but not found in nature. It has to be artificially produced by bombarding thorium with neutrons. U 235 - a fissile material but natural uranium contains only 0.7 per ·cent of this isotope. U 238 - a non-fissile material, which constitutes 99.3 per cent of natural uranium. It can however be used to produce PU239 by bombarding with neutrons ..
• Plutonium: Not a naturally occurring element. One of its isotopes, PU239' is fissile while others are not. Plutonium can be produced by bombarding U 238 with neutrons.
• Thorium: A rare earth element found naturally in the beach sands of Kerala. It can be converted into fissile U 233 by bombarding with neutrons.


Heart of the matter

A nuclear power plant is similar to a coal-fired plant except for the way heat is produced. In a thermal plant coal or gas is burnt. In a nuclear plant, the fuel consists of uranium or plutonium whose tiny nuclei (radius 10 -12 cm) are split, using a subatomic particle called the neutron as the scalpel. This results in the release of a large amount of energy. However, there is a substantial difference in the efficiency of the two processes. In fact, one ton of uranium can produce as much energy as 2.5 million tonnes of coal.

Natural uranium consists of two types (isotopes) - of uranium U 238 (99.3 per cent) and U 235 (0.7 per cent). However, only U 235 is fissionable. But extracting U 235 or increasing its percentage (enriching) is a highly expensive process, even though a power reactor needs only 3-4 per cent enrichment while a bomb needs very high enrichment (80 per cent and above). India's uranium reserves are limited to about 78,000 tonnes. So the choice in front of Homi Bhabha and his associates in the 1950s was to look for a reactor that did not need enriched uranium as fuel

Canada came up with such a reactor known as Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), which uses natural uranium with­out enrichment while using heavy water as a moderator. Canada offered the technol­ogy at very attractive terms and even showed willingness to involve Indians to some degree in developing and stabilising the design. However, Canada built only one such reactor in Rajasthan and aban­doned the other reactor half-way in pique after India exploded a nuclear device at Pokhran in 1974. Incited by the US, it cut off all further contact, aid and even infor­mation regarding nuclear matters.

Indian scientists had to, with great difficulty, develop capabilities to build and improve these PHWRS and then trans­fer the technology to a nascent industry. Indian engineering industry had no expe­rience in large-scale precision fabrication. It could just about fabricate equipment for dairies, cement plants or small chemi­cal plants. But today, the painstaking developmental work has paid off and companies like L&T, BHEl, Walchandna­gar, Godrej, MTAR and others can willy-nilly produce not only the 220 MW reac­tors but the more modern 500 MW PHWRS as well.

PHWRS are the workhorse of NPC - an undertaking of the Department of Atomic Energy - corporatised in 1987. It is esti­mated that the present uranium reserves are sufficient to produce 10 GW per year (1 GW is 1,000 MW) for 30-odd years. At the same time, the beach sands in Kerala contain more than 360,000 tonnes of thorium. In appropriate conditions, thorium can be converted to another fissionable isotope of uranium (U 233).

So the current wisdom in nuclear plan­ning consists of producing about 10 GW of power by using PHWRS. The spent fuel of PHWRS can be reprocessed to obtain another fissionable material- plutonium (Pu 239). The plutonium produced is less than uranium consumed. But if we mix plutonium, uranium and thorium and burn them in a Fast Breeder Reactor, then more plutonium is produced than consumed and thorium is converted into fissionable U 233 as well - hence the name "breeder reactor". This U 233 produced in a breeder reactor can be mixed with thorium and again burnt in a reactor to produce power. Thus, in a three-stage programme, India's nuclear resources can be optimally utilised.

India has mastered PHWR technology and has moved ahead to design a 500 MW reactor on its own. But development of Fast Breeder Reactor technology is still at R&D stage at Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam. Meanwhile scientists at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre have also produced small amounts of U 233 by bombarding thorium and demonstrated the feasibility of the three-stage nuclear programme by building a small research reactor using U 233.


Interview: Nuclear power is ready to take off

"There is no single energy plan at a global level. Each country has to examine its particular conditions and devise one for itself. In India's case Nuclear Power has to be an important component. The learning curve is over. Our own R&D, Indian industry, trained manpower, etc have all reached a critical mass. The nuclear power programme is ready to take off", said Dr R.Chidambaram, chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, while talking to Shivanand Kanavi


How is the fund allocation for nuclear programme now?

The lack of funds during the Eighth Plan hurt the power programme. Now it is better. The funding has gone up from Rs1 70 crore during 1993-94 to Rs900 crore this year. This should continue during the Ninth Plan. Four 220 MW units are coming on stream this year and the next. Two 500 MW units are going to come up at Tarapur, and civil work has already started. We are hoping to get funding for another four units of 220 MW and four more of 500 MW have been planned but are yet to be sanctioned money.

What is holding up the Fast Breeder programme? Is it funds?

No, it is not funds. Technology development itself takes time. Now the Fast Breeder Test Reactor at Kalpakkam is functioning very well. A lot of R&D work has been done. The sodium coolant circuit is functioning well. Excellent burnout rates of 40,000-50,000 MW per tonne have been achieved. Now the 500 MW Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor's design is being reviewed by Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Once we get the go-ahead we will start making the prototype. It should be ready by about 2001 .

If there are snags in the Fast Breeder Programme then is there any way of using our thorium reserves?

The Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) designed by Anil Kakodkar and his team in BARe will use a mixture of oxides of uranium and plutonium in the central zone of the core, while a mixture of thorium and uranium 233 will be used in the outer areas. So, that is one way to start using thorium even before we master fast breeder technology and go over to thorium-uranium reactors. AHWR is a very interesting design. It has not only advanced safety features but also uses light water as coolant.

It is believed that India can make bomb grade highly enriched uranium. So why can't we make reactor grade low enriched uranium and develop a Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) - which is much easier to operate?

No comments on the first part of your question. If there is enough need for low enriched uranium then we can do it. It is not technologically beyond us. The issue is economic. Once we get more experience with PWRS by working with the two 1,000 MW Russian reactors which we are buying from the Russians, then we can go for PWR design as well.

There is a feeling that if India signs the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) then it will help the power sector. What is your view?

There is no question of India signing the NPT in its present form. If they are ready to change the NPT and let us sign it as a nuclear weapon power, then it is a different issue. We are ready for safeguards for any installation that has been built with external assistance. Other installations are off bounds. Just as the Chinese or any member of the nuclear club do. If these changes take place then of course there will be easier flow of technology, turnkey projects, fuel, etc. Even with meagre funding we have kept nuclear technology alive, since it is the technology of the future as far as energy is concerned.

Today we cannot access soft loans from the World Bank for funding nuclear power. Will that change if we sign NPT?

The World Bank is not funding nuclear projects anywhere. So to that extent it will not change by signing the NPT. But it is being increasingly realised that for developing countries and especially in Asia, nuclear power is an integral part of modernising the infrastructure. So even the World Bank might eventually change its stand.

Safety--Indian Nuclear Plants

Business India, March 14-27, 1994

Crying Wolf

Exaggerated fears about safety in the Indian nuclear power industry obscure the more pressing regulatory issues.

Shivanand Kanavi

A fortnight ago the American TV network, CBS, broadcast a film on India's nuclear power stations -Another Chernobyl? The film described the Indian nuclear programme as the most dangerous in the world and cited numerous 'instances' of unsafe operating practices at Indian nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, in its eagerness to titillate a jaded American TV audience, CBS overstated its case. Sensational they may be, but such exaggerated accounts, in fact, obscure and detract attention from the very real technical and safety problems that bedevil the nuclear industry everywhere.

Concern has, however, centred on what CBS correspondent Steve Kroft described as "the crack in the Rajasthan reactor.” Unit I of the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station, at Rawatbhatta, commissioned in 1972, has developed certain problems, which have worried nuclear engineers. It is important to understand the nature of these problems.

The crack in the 'endshield' was discovered in 1981. The endshield is an attachment to the main reactor vessel called the 'calandria’. The fuel bundles pass through the end shield and are defuelled or refuelled through it, on line. The endshield does not contain radioactive fuel or the heavy water coolant that is used both to draw the heat away from the nuclear reaction to the steam generator and as a moderator to control the chain reaction within the limits suitable for steady power production. Plain water is circulated through the endshield chamber. Unlike the heavy water, this water does not become radioactive. Due to a minute crack in the endshield some of this water was found to have trickled into the containment chamber. It did not cause any release of radioactivity inside the reactor or to the outside environment.

The reactor was immediately shut down, and investigations revealed that the crack had been caused by embrittlement due to neutron bombardment of the carbon steel plate. The reactor had been designed by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. They too had faced a similar problem earlier at their plant at Douglas Point, in Ontario, Canada, and subsequently had changed over to another material for fabricating the endshield. But following the 1974 nuclear explosion at Pokhran, Canada had ceased all nuclear co-operation with India, and Indian nuclear engineers had to fall back on their own resources to deal with the problem.

The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, the Indian watchdog body for safety in all installations handling radioactive materials, immediately stepped in. The AERB along with reactor engineers at BARC and the Nuclear Power Corporation decided that the crack would not increase nor would it lead to greater seepage if the reactor were operated at half its designed power level, of 220 MW. Since then RAPS-I has been operating at a power generating capacity of 100 MW and the crack is being continuously monitored.

The crack has caused more worry to the power engineers than to the safety personnel. Indium foil, which has the property of changing shape under pressure and seeping into cracks, thereby sealing them, has been pressed onto the endshield crack. The fuel channels near the crack have also been defuelled as abundant caution. Attempts are also on to design methods to reach the endshield and replace it with a new stainless steel one. These attempts will take some time to fructify but can then be used profitably at all reactors as they ‘age’.

Even in the worst case scenario of the end shield cracking open and all the water pouring out, there will be no radioactivity released, either inside or outside the station. The reactor will be immediately shut down and unless methods are developed to safely clean the leaked water and replace the endshield, the reactor will be permanently shutdown by the AERB.

The other problem that is being monitored in RAPS-I&II and MAPS-I is the sagging of the primary heat transfer tubes within the reactor. These are tubes containing pressurised heavy water which carries away the heat from the nuclear fission taking place inside the fuel bundles. These pressurised tubes are separated from the calandria tubes by a concentric gap of 8mm by garter springs placed at intervals. While the heavy water in the primary heat transfer tubes is at about 270 degrees Celsius, the calandria tubes are surrounded by cold heavy water, used as a moderator, at 70 degrees Celsius.

It has been observed that due to vibrations within the PHT tubes, the springs tend to shift from their positions leading to a lack of support at certain portions of the PHT tubes. The weight of the zircalloy PHT tube containing heavy fuel bundles makes it then sag. If the sag leads to contact with the colder calandria tube, a local cold spot which develops at the point of contact leads to the accumulation of deuterium in the zircalloy tube at that point, which can lead to blistering and even a possible rupture, leading to the coolant draining away from the PHT tube. Even in such an eventuality the heavy water is still not released outside the reactor. The reactor will have to be shut down and the particular tube isolated. The same loss of coolant in a boiling water reactor will lead to an extremely serious accident, as witnessed in the Three Mile Island, US. The Indian pressurised heavy water reactor is much safer in that respect.

When such blistering was observed in the Pickering reactor, in Canada, the Canadians switched over, in 1983, to a better material called niobium-stabilised zircalloy with a greater support of a larger number of more or less fixed garter springs. Again, due to the embargo on Indo-Canadian nuclear exchanges, the information reached India only in 1985. Since then all reactors are being periodically monitored for any sign of sagging using an ultrasonic probe developed by BARC. BARC and the NPC are also developing a complex retubing machine that can change the old tubes with the newly developed niobium-stabilised zircalloy tubes. The newer reactors at Kaiga and Kakrapar are fitted with these newer tubes.

Another worrisome problem is the corrosion of some valves that use cobalt alloys. Their corrosion, though very small, leads to cobalt being exposed inside the reactor to radiation which coverts into radioactive Cobalt-60. This isotope has a long half-life and poses an exposure risk to workers carrying out maintenance. However, a very positive development in this regard is the development of a chemical method using dilute organic acids to remove this CobaIt-60 from the system. It has been recently used successfully in MAPS-I; the results showing the reduction of radiation ranging from 50 to 97 per cent was reported in the last week of February at the International Conference on Operational Safety of Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors.

Conversion of small amounts of heavy water in the reactor to the deadly tritium is another problem that is monitored in all Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors, Recently BARC has also developed a method to remove tritium from the heavy water used in reactors. Its on-line application is still to be developed but has given a fillip to all those concerned with safety.

Dr A. Gopalkrishnan, a nuclear engineer from the University of California, at Berkeley, who worked on reactor designs and safety in various establishments in the US for 15 years, now heads the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. While being proud of the achievements of our scientists and engineers regarding safety, he has a very clear agenda for higher safety standards in Indian nuclear power stations. Right now no individual worker is exposed to more than internationally accepted levels of radiation, but this is being achieved by using more manpower and rotating them so that the accumulated dosage per person is still at international levels.

But Gopalkrishnan is not satisfied with this arrangement. Most exposure happens not during the operation of the plant but while maintaining it or carrying out some repairs. He says, "More attention to local shielding, training repair crews using mockups prior to the job so that they spend the least amount of time in radiation zones, semi-automation of maintenance and inspection jobs, will definitely bring the total dosage of all workers in a plant to international levels.” Internationally acceptable radiation exposure levels are continuously being scaled down, leading to pressure on our own nuclear establishment to better safety practices.

Following the fire at the Narora Unit-l power station in March 1993, the AERB initiated a planned shut down of all nuclear power stations to check for faulty turbine blades. Cracks in a few blades in the General Electric-designed generator at Narora had led to the fire that caused damage worth over Rs.75 crore and considerable revenue loss due to plant shut down. Though over 50 such sets worldwide have shown cracks after prolonged usage, the sets used in India tend to break down earlier due to unstable conditions in the Indian power grid system. Due to wide load fluctuations, the frequency of the alternating current in the grid varies widely between 49 Hertz and 51.5 Hertz, leading to dangerous vibrations in the turbine.

The AERB' s insistence on checking all the turbines meant a loss of revenue for the NPC, but already the precaution has yielded results. Four blades with cracks were found in MAPS-l in Madras recently by the independent consulting group from the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute that carried out the tests. Though very new, the Kakrapar-I turbine is also being checked and, in fact, all blades are being replaced with design modifications made by BHEL. The Narora fire was not in the reactor but in the turbine and the safety systems of the reactor operated as designed. That is why although it was a financial disaster; the fire was classified on the Nuclear Events Scale - a sort of nuclear 'Richter scale' - as a level-3 incident and not an accident.

When asked why no official report has been published so far about Narora to allay public fears and permit informed debate, Gopalkrishnan says, "My aim is to make at least safety related information as publicly accessible as possible. Instead of leaving this to the individual initiative of the chairman of the AERB, it is better that it is statutorily recognised as well."

Regarding some of the questions raised by the critics about the radiation hazard at the thorium-rich, monazite sands in Kerala and the unusual number of deformities among people in villages around the Rawatbhatta power station, Gopalkrishnan says, "A highly rigorous epidemiological study is being conducted at Chavara, Kerala, by the regional cancer research institute. In another year the results will be available. Let us wait till then. Meanwhile, no such epidemiological work can be conducted in the villages around the Rawatbhatta plant since the sample size is too small to come to any conclusion. However, according to the suggestion of Dr Sanghamitra Ghadekar (an activist who has herself painstakingly collected the Rajasthan data and who is asking for a scientific investigation), I am going to constitute a panel of genetic and medical experts to analyse it from that angle and see. After all, as far as radiation from the Rajasthan power station is concerned, it has been continuously monitored and no dangerous level of radiation has been released outside."

Given the pressure on PSUs to become profit centres and the temptation on part of managements to take short cuts, the question of safety in nuclear power stations assumes new significance. Due to increased openness shown by the AERB, more individual workers, as well as unions, are directly approaching the AERB, often anonymously, with safety related complaints. The AERB is examining the complaints. However, there is a need to develop a second opinion regarding safety and nuclear engineering. In this respect, it is inexplicable that the NPC is not utilising the safety audit services offered by the International Atomic Energy Agency. After all, the safety services are independent of signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and, in fact, Indian experts have participated in such multinational teams to check safety in others' plants.

There is, however, no excuse for not developing nuclear engineering faculties in some academic institutions, like the IITs and the Indian Institute of Science, which can then provide the expertise for a second opinion as well. Besides, without questioning the authenticity of the data provided by the health physics division of BARC, which checks the release of radiation to the environment at all power stations and monitors the individual doses absorbed by each worker, it is clear that constituting the division as a separate body will enhance the credibility of the nuclear programme.

Lastly, while the developments in indigenous nuclear R&D have been impressive, particularly in the light of the embargo both in the supply of equipment and technical information to India, the weaknesses are there for all to see. For example, while all the reactors are working at lower than their rated capacity, the natural focus should be on carrying out well-focused R&D. At this stage the hurry to also develop advanced reactor systems, fast breeder prototype reactors, etc, shows that, without solving the problems at hand, there is a tendency to go on to the next prestigious project. In fact, it is most puzzling that BARC wants to have its hand in every scientific pie, whether parallel processing, superconductivity, or lasers, which can very well be done by other academic and R&D institutions. It would do well to concentrate instead on making our nuclear programme both safer and economically successful.

The International Nuclear Event Scale

Level and Examples

Major accident, 7 ,Chernobyl, USSR, 1986

Serious accident, 6, None

Accident with off-site risks, 5, Windscale, UK, 1957 and Three Mile Islands, USA,1979

Accident mainly in installation, 4 , Saint- Laurent, France, 1980

Serious incident, 3, Narora, India, 1993, Vendellos, Spain, 1989

Incident, 2 , None

Anomaly, 1, None