Energy Security and India

Energy Security and India

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

(This article appeared in Rediff.com at http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-column-an-energy-sufficient-india-a-long-road-ahead/20120320.htm )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.Total Installed Capacity: Sector MW %age State Sector 83,563.65 45.74 Central Sector 56,572.63 30.96 Private Sector 42,553.34 23.29 Total 1,82,689.62 Fuel MW %age Total Thermal 119040.98 65.16 Coal 100,098.38 54.79 Gas 17,742.85 9.71 Oil 1,199.75 0.65 Hydro (Renewable) 38,706.40 21.18 Nuclear 4,780.00 2.61 RES** (MNRE) 20,162.24 11.03 Total 1,82,689.62 100.00

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

In terms of medium and long term planning, Indian coal needs to be mined efficiently. However it has large amount of silica, which appears as large amount of fly ash in power stations, when it is burnt. This ash needs to be disposed of in a way that does not harm the surrounding air and rivers and lakes. However much needs to be done in this respect. Imported coal has much higher calorific value but also has sulphur and nitrogenous content which leads to large release of sulphuric and nitric acids during rain, that is dangerous to forests and environment. The fact that open pit mining itself needs to be handled properly to limit the damage to the environment is only recently being addressed in India. According to scientific studies, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste). Some of the ecologically disastrous effects of coal based thermal power plants are already visible in Chhattisgarh, where large clusters of pithead coal powered thermal power plants are scheduled to come up.

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

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

Methane from Coal Beds is another source that is being explored in Eastern India. Many blocks have been auctioned to various companies and it will add a significant but still small amount to the current gas availability.

Recently ONGC has drilled a R&D well for Shale Gas in Paschim Banga (West Bengal) and studies are continuing. Shale Gas has been a great new success story in energy and has meteorically risen to provide 25% of gas in US. However new environmental concerns are being raised about the chemicals that are used in hydraulic fracking to release the gas from layers deep down. Like Coal Bed Methane, Shale Gas too promises to be another source of much needed gas for India.

Geophysicists tell us that India sits on a large ocean of Gas Hydrates at great depths. However the technology to exploit these is not yet available globally and they may provide a valuable gas source in the future.

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

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

State Wise Numbers And Aggregate Capacity Of Small hydro projects (Upto 25 Mw) Installed & Under Implementation (AS ON 31.3.2009)
Sl. No.	State	Projects Installed		Projects under Implementation
		Nos.	Capacity (MW)	Nos.	Capacity (MW)
1	Andhra Pradesh	59	180.83	12	21.50
2	Arunachal Pradesh	81	61.32	43	25.94
3	Assam	4	27.1	4	15.00
4	Bihar	12	54.60	4	3.40
5	Chattisgarh	5	18.050	1	1.00
6	Goa	1	0.050	-	-
7	Gujarat	2	7.000	2	5.60
8	Haryana	5	62.700	1	6.00
9	Himachal Pradesh	79	230.915	9	26.75
10	J&K	32	111.830	5	5.91
11	Jharkhand	6	4.050	8	34.85
12	Karnataka	83	563.45	14	85.25
13	Kerala	19	133.87	2	3.2
14	Madhya Pradesh	10	71.16	4	19.90
15	Maharashtra	29	211.325	5	31.20
16	Manipur	8	5.450	3	2.75
17	Meghalaya	4	31.030	3	1.70
18	Mizoram	18	24.470	1	8.50
19	Nagaland	10	28.670	4	4.20
20	Orissa	8	44.300	6	23.93
21	Punjab	29	123.900	2	18.75
22	Rajasthan	10	23.850	-	-
23	Sikkim	16	47.110	2	5.20
24	Tamil Nadu	15	90.050	4	13.00
25	Tripura	3	16.010	-	-
26	Uttar Pradesh	9	25.100	-	-
27	Uttarakhand	93	127.92	33	40.35
28	West Bengal	23	98.400	16	79.25
29	A&N Islands	1	5.250	-	-
Total		674	2429.77 MW	188	483.23 MW

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

Many people naively believe that India having been blessed with ample amounts of sun light, Solar would be a natural choice as a major source of electricity. However, converting sunlight to electricity is a very expensive process and it currently costs about 4 times the conventional. Even though the technology is more than 100 years old, a lot more advancement has to happen in basic research in new materials to convert sunlight to electricity more efficiently (currently it is only 12-16%) and cheaply. People who claim that solar is environmentally friendly do not understand that the silicon chip making process uses some of the most toxic chemicals, which are then let out as effluents. Today India is buying a lot of solar panels from China and if we decide to start fab for the same in India to lower prices then we will come across the associated environmental issues as well. Moreover, solar electricity needs to be stored in expensive and environmentally harmful lead batteries, since there is no Sun in the night. Any large scale use of solar power would lead to serious issues over disposing of the batteries. Thus environmental friendliness of solar technology is a over simplification. It is expected that further advances in science and technology of materials, efficiency and storage will happen in perhaps the next 50 years. We should also recognise that solar plants of say even a modest 100 MW require several square kilometres of land.

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

India has developed nuclear power reactors using natural uranium and has been improving the technology in the last 40 years. India does not yet have the technology for large enriched uranium reactors and is hence planning to import them from Russia, France and US. Indian Uranium resources are of very small and of very low quality. However the opening up of international trade in nuclear materials in 2008 by the Nuclear Suppliers Group has allowed India to import Uranium from large Uranium producing countries like Kazakhstan and Russia. In the future, it can also do so from Canada and Australia. India has also developed the technology to process the radioactive waste from these reactors and extract useful plutonium from the waste. This reprocessing of fuel has largely resolved the waste disposal problem, which is very serious in North America and Europe. Plutonium thus obtained has been used for making bombs as well as to develop power generation in Fast Breeder Reactors. In fact that is the reason the reprocessing technology has been strictly controlled by US and other powers. The first large Fast Breeder Reactor designed by India is soon coming online in Kalpakkam near Chennai and will take India to the cutting edge of this technology globally. India is also blessed with large amounts of Thorium. The first Thorium reactor of the world has also been designed by India and the construction of a 300 MW Thorium reactor known as AHWR will start soon. The world will be looking forward to these innovations.

Nuclear reactors are small in size but need a radius of few kilometres around them to be ready for evacuation in order to diminish the danger to human life in the highly unlikely case of an accident. So far, in the nearly 42 years of operation there have been no serious accidents in Indian reactors. Today’s reactors have been designed to take care of many accidental scenarios of earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks etc that have the potential to damage the reactor core. The reactors are being designed to safely shut down in an emergency. Thus no radiation need be leaked to the environment.

Uranium mining, handling, reactor maintenance are all potential sources of radiation exposure to workers. Thus extreme care has to be taken regarding prescribed safety procedures during the entire cycle and no chalta hai attitude will work.

Many people ask, “Is it (nuclear power) dangerous?” Since radiation is invisible it leads to many irrational fears. The short answer is, “Yes it is” and it needs scientifically trained staff to handle it at all stages. However looking at the energy security of India in the future and considering the strengths and weaknesses of other sources of electricity available to us, which have been discussed above, nuclear remains an important source of energy security for India as our planet’s fossil fuels dwindle and become extremely expensive. It is also environmentally benign due to no carbon emission or fly ash disposal and other problems. Nuclear power especially with Fast Breeders and Thorium Reactors will be an important source that can provide electricity at competitive rates to the teaming Indians for more than 100 years based on our own Thorium reserves.

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

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

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Sam Pitroda: Telecom Revolution

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

Making of a Revolution

Sam and Indian Telecom

 

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

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

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

• India had meagre foreign exchange resources.

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

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

The question was, could India afford to spend enough money to develop its own switch and manufacture it at a competitive price? Even the most optimistic advocates of indigenous effort were sceptical, and they preferred to take the route of licensed production in agreement with a foreign multinational company. The CEO of a large multinational wrote to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, cautioning her that his company had invested more than a billion dollars in developing the technology, and implying that it would be foolhardy for India to attempt to re-invent the wheel with its limited resources.

That accepted wisdom needed challenging. And the person who could dare to do so was Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based telecom engineer from Orissa, who had studied in the US and participated in the development and evolution of digital switching technology. Pitroda had over thirty patents in the technology while working at GTE and later at Rockwell.

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

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

Pitroda brought along with him his knowledge of technology, a ‘can do’ attitude and an impressive silvery mane he tossed while making a point, but not much else. He brought a breath of fresh air of optimism, aggression, confidence, flamboyance and media savvy into Indian telecom. He offered his services to the Indian government for one rupee a year.

And the offer was taken.

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

“India, like most of the Third World, was using its foreign exchange to buy the West’s abandoned technology and install obsolete equipment that doomed the poor to move like telecom snails where Europeans, Americans and Japanese were beginning to move like information greyhounds,” asserts Pitroda in his characteristic fashion. “The technological disparity was getting bigger, not smaller. India and countries like her were falling farther and farther behind not just in the ability to chat with relatives or call the doctor but, much more critically, in the capacity to coordinate development activities, pursue scientific study, conduct business, operate markets, and participate more fully in the international community. I was perfectly certain that no large country entirely lacking an indigenous electronics industry could hope to compete economically in the coming century. To survive, India had to bring telecommunications to its towns and villages; to thrive, it had to do it with Indian talent and Indian technology”, Pitroda added in his article.

Many discussions over three years, plus flying back and forth between New Delhi and Chicago, led to the establishment of C-DOT, the Centre for Development of Telematics. C-DOT was registered as a non-profit society funded by the government but enjoying complete autonomy. The Indian parliament agreed to allocate $36 million to C-DOT over 36 months to develop a digital switching system suited to the Indian network.

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

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

By 1987, within the three-year limit, C-DOT had delivered a 128-line rural exchange, a 128-line private automatic branch exchange for businesses, a small central exchange with a capacity of 512 lines, and was working on a 10,000-line exchange. The components for all these exchanges were interchangeable for maximum flexibility in design, installation and repairs, and all of it was being manufactured in India to international standards—a guaranteed maximum of one hour’s downtime in twenty years of service! There was one problem; C-DOT had fallen short on one goal—the large urban exchange was behind schedule—but, overall, it had proved itself a colossal, resounding success.

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

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

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

Pitroda and Rajiv Gandhi also decided to open up the technology to the private sector. So C-DOT rapidly transferred the technology to over 680 manufacturers, who have supplied equipment worth Rs 7,230 crore and created 35,000 jobs in electronics. Seeing the ruggedness of these rural exchanges, many developing countries, such as Bhutan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ghana, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Nepal, Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda and Yemen decided to try them out.

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

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

THE STD BOOTH: A BRILLIANT SOLUTION FOR LOW TELEDENSITY

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

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

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

Sam Pitroda: An Interview

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

"We need to redesign the nation"

 

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

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

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

How did C-DOT come along?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you overcome the resistance to the idea?

Unions reacted saying ‘no way’ we will allow this to happen. We started dialogue with unions saying this is important in the long-run and in passengers’ interest. In one of the conversations somebody figured out that if we put computers we would need to have Air-Conditioned rooms so people will benefit from the better work conditions and environments. So we said let’s try it in some place and create a POC (Proof Of Concept). We told the board, ‘give us a slot to try and if you are not happy, unions are not happy then we will revisit’. So people agreed that we should try. Dr P P Gupta the then CMD of CMC was very happy. He was given the mandate to prove the concept. CMC was seen as a new organization; dynamic and innovative. We had the talent in CMC to do this kind of things. After a lot of effort, when we showed the unions that it can work, then we saw change.

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

What about wider adoption of IT in the railway operations?

That’s how the CRIS (Centre for Railway Information Systems) was born. Besides reservation there are lots of other things but it took 20yrs for people to embrace this whole idea in a big way. Reservation and ticketing was an instant success. People thought it was a miracle and I would say this was the first grand success for IT in India. By then C-DOT was rolling and exchanges and telecom modernisation were seen as the important.

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

In the Indian Railways, we have huge possibility to use IT for travelling, traffic billing, we have built the highway we want satellite based or GSM based real time monitoring anti-collision device etc. All of that it is very simple. Indian Railway has 40,000 kms of its own optical fibre they are trying to put another 10000 so IT is becoming important in railways in traffic building. Many people die at railway crossings everywhere. We could give the person manning it this little device, which listens to the train coming in and gives an alarm signal that train coming so get off the track. Technology should be used to prevent such deaths. Very soon many technology initiatives of Indian railways are going to be announced.

There were also other technology missions….

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

What are your current preoccupations?

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

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

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

So going back to the original thought we are nation of connected million and we need to do things differently we need to use cameras, videos, scanning to reduce travel you know to manage our cities better. We cannot manage our cities the way we have been managing. For example, today everybody is focused on urbanisation but their idea is Mumbai has 18 million people and it will become 26 million in........ But we don’t want extrapolation. We need restructuring. How will I use GIS (Geographical Information System) to make Mumbai better. How to use scanners to make Mumbai secure? We really need to make our cities smarter. Come up with different ideas how we improve our slums.

Where is the resistance now?

The government in a sense is not technology friendly. There are young individuals like Jayaram Ramesh’s of the world, who are tech savvy, but there are secretaries in IT who don’t use computers. The Department of Electronics uses manual files to make decisions; they should computerize their files, how many people in Department of Electronics use computers to make decisions. They are taking decisions on technology but they are using manual files. But that’s the system we have. You never see people in Indian government taking notes on a laptop, how many ministers know how to use laptops. You have to be connected you have to be able to read your e-mails, you can’t write or call your secretary and say “dictate karta hoon note likho” (will dictate a letter note it down) and then mail it and then wait for the reply. Those days are over, we are a connected people. We have built this nation in the last 20 years based on technology. Today if we have over $300 billion forex reserve it is only because of technology. IT has given us great deal of global recognition, lots of global companies of our own, lots of success stories, our advantage is we are in large numbers.

Archaeo-Metallurgy, Dr Baldev Raj, A Conversation

From: Ghadar Jari Hai, Vol 5, Issue 2

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

Dr Baldev Raj

Archaeo-metallurgy: Where Gods come alive

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BR: Yes, Wootz steel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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