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.

Book Review: Reinventing India--R A Mashelkar

Business India, Oct 2, 2011

Managing Brand India

Shivanand Kanavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How it is then, in the 21^st century, the situation seems to have changed in global perception? Today as Mashelkar points out in his collection of writings and speeches, “Reinventing India”, India is a very important part of the global knowledge network. Indian researchers are being sought after by global corporations.

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

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

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

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

One blemish in the otherwise well produced book is poor copy editing. For example, on page 8, a sentence, “24 July 1995 marks the day on which India started to reinvent itself” appears as a separate paragraph with no connection to the previous one or the subsequent one, puzzling the reader about its significance.

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

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

Bridging the Digital Divide in India

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

Excerpts from an hour long programme on Lok Sabha TV on bridging the digital divide in India, where yours truly was invited.

Head Start    Lok Sabha TV

Nov 10, 2009

“Bridging the Digital Divide”

Panel discussion Participants- Shivanand Kanavi and Dinesh Sharma

Host: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

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

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

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

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

Paranjoy: Explain what you mean by that…

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

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

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

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

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

Paranjoy - What really changed in the mindset of employees who opposed the use computers in Banks?

Shivanand - There are several things involved in it, first of all you need the motivation in the top leadership to actually implement a programme like this and communicate with the employees and to all the stakeholders the benefits of this to the banks and their customers. The employees have the stakes in the growth of the banks, its survival, profitability etc and as well as their own personal growth. Of course they have to assure them of job security which is the first thing you would have to ensure. In India no project has been done successfully without the implementer assuring the employee the jobs are safe. But then there is something more than that, you are learning new skills. You are moving into a different level of skills and technology and ability to do many more things than you used to do before.

Paranjoy - Dinesh do you agree with Shivanand?

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

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

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

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

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

Paranjoy: Let me raise another issue. Even if there are some success stories why are we not able to replicate that success elsewhere?

Dinesh - A few years back a survey was done on all kinds of ICT or eGovernanace projects that are going on in the country. At that time the count was 300 or so and they were in different pockets, like Bhoomi in the whole of Karnataka, Friends in Kerala, others in AP, Tamil Nadu and North. It was found in that survey only 15% of them have been successful in their objective, 35% partially failed. So that was the kind of assessment of these projects. The problem is for any eGovernanace or citizen interface government project to succeed, we need three things: First willingness to reform, because you are bringing a new system, there is no point in computerising existing forms and putting them on the web, that is not e-governance, that is not going to solve the problem and it might even complicate it. So there should be willingness to reform the existing system without that e-governance cannot succeed. Second is availability of technology, you might need to develop software, you need to have a hardware particularly designed for that project and so on for example, in Bhoomi they tried Bio-metric technology for first time on such a large scale since many cannot enter a password. The data, Land records should be available only to certain people and their bio metric data was needed. This technology was specially developed for Bhoomi project. So the availability of hardware, software and technology is needed to execute these projects.

Paranjoy - What is preventing us from scaling up such successful projects? Why are others not repeating it? Is it lack of political will or resources?

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

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

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

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

Paranjoy - Vested interests has also become a cliché. Who are these vested interests? How can they be eliminated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paranjoy - Can we expedite the process of IT usage?

Dinesh - We have moved very slowly, there are many projects which are moving very slowly. Everything is not what we would like it to be but compare that to what has happened in NREGS where they are issuing smart cards, money is getting transferred to their account etc. The difference is that many projects have to deal with legacy systems and procedures which we have been working from past 100 years. It’s very difficult to change the legacy system. It involves both the mindset and processes involved. For example you need a signature, an emblem etc. all that can be solved. Technology has a solution for everything and you can get as good a birth certificate as you would normally get as a handwritten certificate. But it’s a question of how do you change a mindset and how do you change those legacy processes in the system, that is the biggest challenge

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

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

Paranjoy - Would you like to talk about telemedicine, Dinesh?

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

Paranjoy – Shivanand do you want to add to that?

Shivanand: Yes. I want to add another aspect of healthcare i.e. healthcare management and not just telemedicine based consultation. How do you network the hospitals, how do you create a database of patients? A positive example in this regards is the Arogya Shree scheme in AP. Literally millions of people below poverty line are covered by it. A person who has a serious medical problem goes to a nearby project centre and shows his card and through the IT system they can find out which hospital is the best to deal with this and where beds are available etc. They are just using a keyboard and mouse to do this. Instead of running from pillar to post, paying the bill and trying to recover it through reimbursement, all this is just a cashless transaction. So that’s a success. So I think using IT to make efficient public health is also important.

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

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

Technology will not address on its own how the rest, 700 or 800 million people can be added to this inclusive growth. That’s why you see a chunky growth, certain sectors would advance fast despite the fact that the roads are bad etc. Telecom is a classic example, nobody envisaged 10-15 years back that 500 million mobile phones would be there in India and today we have them and all kinds of people are using them. If the 450 to 500 million figure is correct, then nearly half the population has mobile phones and that is obviously an advance in technology application despite bad roads, and education and the whole social sector being poor. Including 700-800 million people is a much deeper question, which has to do with the structure of our economy, I don’t think information technology can address that. IT can help in managing certain things for eg- I remember a well-known politician asking in 2001, “Yeh IT, YT kya hai?” He said if there is drought how IT is going to bring rain. The answer is, IT can help you in drought management and relief management, it cannot bring rains, it cannot fundamentally improve agriculture in that sense. After all, IT is information technology so it can give you information.

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

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

Shivanand - I think yes. Broadband is going to provide rich content to reach people and in no way landlines or cables are going to provide that. The broadband has to come wirelessly. So any new development, whether it is 3G whether it is WiMax or 4G, all these new technologies are coming. Whichever proves affordable and replicable on large scale is going to make a big difference.

Another example which I wanted to give you is a technology application that can include many more people who are not yet in this 300 million. It is a technology for literacy, which was developed with a lot of inputs from linguists, psychologists and computer scientists. It is called a Computer Based Functional Literacy module. It uses discarded computers. It does not need high powered computers and within 40 hours it can teach an adult illiterate enough to help their children in homework, people who could not read and write have been able to read news papers and help their children in home work. The thing is to replicate it and the estimate is that within next 5 years we could make entire India functionally literate

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

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

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

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

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

Paranjoy: But are we becoming a nation of cyber coolies with body shopping or knowledge workers? Of course I am using exaggerated expressions.

Dinesh: There is no doubt that we have good base of knowledge workers and all the large corporations including big companies like TCS who themselves are a MNC, are seeking knowledge workers wherever they are. Companies and people would go wherever there is a comparative advantage in terms of talent which has become a very important resource and in that sense the world has become flat. We have an advantage of numbers and we have to see how we can add that to our economic growth

Shivanand - In the world of knowledge, in the world of technology, I think the world has become flat and not in other aspects. If you are comparing farmers in Tanjavoor and farmers in California or in Canada then it is not flat. However the point I am making is Satyen Bose had to write a letter to Einstein and wait for months together for a reply when he had worked out a new statistics for photons and that is not necessary in today’s world.

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

Arun Netravali: Father of HDTV

Matunga to Murray Hills

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

Shivanand Kanavi

Business India, January 22, February 4, 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

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

Pages 106-108 from Rupa & Co 2006 Edn

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

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

WHAT PEOPLE WANT

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

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

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

Najam Sethi, Pakistani journalist

Apas ki Baat

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

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

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

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

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

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

K Subrahmanyam - A conversation on India and Geopolitics

K Subrahmanyam - A conversation on India and Geopolitics

A conversation with K Subrahmanyam
(July 29, 2009)

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

Krishnswami Subrahmanyam (1929-2011): IAS(1951)Tamil Nadu; Fellow in Strategic Studies, London School of Economics1966-67; Director ,Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (1st term1968-75, 2nd term 1980-87); Chairman, Joint Intelligence Committee1977-79; Secretary(Defence Production)1979-80; Visiting Professor international relations St.John's Convenor, National Security Advisory Board 1998-2000; Chairman , Kargil Review Committee-1999 

The interview appeared in Rediff in two parts. 
http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-an-interview-with-k-subrahmanyam/20110210.htm
and
http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-part-two-an-interview-with-k-subrahmanyam/20110420.htm

Shivanand Kanavi: I want you to start with an over view of the history of Indian nuclear weapons programme.
K Subrahmanyam: If you go back to Nehru’s writings in the 40s he recognized that it may be used (as a weapon) and then India also must have it. But at the same time he was a man of peace he wanted international peace so essentially he was for development of technology. But he did not overlook the fact that it had a strategic dimension. It comes out very clearly that at one point in time in 1954-55 Homi Bhabha after presiding over the Geneva conference on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, came back with great enthusiasm and proposed to Nehru that India should amend the constitution and say that it would never go nuclear. Nehru wrote back to Bhabha that he should look after physics and leave the international relations to Nehru. We will think about these things when we reach that stage. So at one point of time it was Bhabha who was a peacenik, but as they saw the two major powers accumulating more and more weapons and developing newer weapons and China going nuclear, I presume that Bhabha got converted to the view that India should also go nuclear. The selection of CANDU reactor which would produce plutonium and deputation of Sethna to France to get reprocessing technology would all show that at least in Bhabha’s mind strategic programme was very much there.

Perkovich says Nehru all the time had it in mind but those who think of Nehru as essentially a man of peace would dispute it but it is difficult to say unless personal papers of Nehru are made available. On the other hand in 1964 a few months before he died, while inaugurating the reprocessing plant he also said “come what may, we shall not make these evil things”. Once the Chinese conducted the test Bhabha was determined that India should go for it. Krishna Menon opposed Bhabha.

Once Shastri took over, he was not familiar with all these things and the first time Bhabha came to Delhi to meet him I was told that he was made to wait three days to get an appointment. He was used to an indulgent treatment by Nehru and so he was a little put off. Then Shastri appealed to UK for a nuclear umbrella against the Chinese threat. In the early 60s there was a discussion in the US whether India should be helped to become a nuclear power to neutralize China. This was even before ‘62 as they realized that China was close to building the bomb. It was supported by Dean Rusk in the State Dept but was opposed by Pentagon and McNamara. In ‘64 Bhabha was able to persuade Shastri to sanction SNEP (Subterranean Nuclear Explosion Project). In early ‘65 there was a AICC session in Durgapur and there was pressure from some Congress members K C Pant who was a young MP who said that India should go nuclear. Shastri did not want to commit himself so finally he said ‘not now’. He did not rule it out. To some extent it helped Bhabha in getting the SNEP project sanctioned and it was under SNEP that Ramanna , Chidambaram, P K Iyengar were brought into Trombay. Then Bhabha died in the accident in 1966. Sarabhai took over.

Sarabhai coming from a Gandhian background was opposed to it. He argued that we did not have enough plutonium at that time and even by ‘67 if we had enough for one test then what would you do after wards. Thus he alienated the Trombay people. The result was they boycotted Sarabhai and did not share any information with him. But Sarabhai was a gentleman and a very astute man and over a period of time he changed his mind. Not many people know about it but he himself told me the last time we met in Aug 1971 while having dinner at Ashoka Hotel five months before he died. Then the Trombay people made Purnima the Fast Pulsed Reactor using plutonium from Candu. In 1967 Indira Gandhi sent Sarabhai and L K Jha on a worldwide mission seeking nuclear security guarantee for India. They went to Russia, France, US and UK. They wanted a joint guarantee. They did not get it. In 1965 when the NPT resolution was moved we were one of the sponsors. We propounded the balancing principle viz. no more proliferation but weapon powers should negotiate give up their weapons. When the matter came up in Geneva in 1967 our delegate V C Trivedi found that something else was going on. They wanted to prevent everybody else from going nuclear but on the other hand they did not want to have any limits on what they were doing. He made powerful arguments against this NPT and they are still quoted today. To some extent the P-5 found that India was a thorn in their flesh in Geneva. In 1968 when the matter came up regarding whether we should accede to NPT (it was not debated much in the cabinet) Mrs Gandhi and her close advisors like G Parthasarathy, P N Haksar were all against it. At that time I was the director of IDSA (Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis) and conducted a crusade against the NPT that India should go nuclear. At that time there were a group of parliamentarians called Young Turks who were leftist Congressmen like Krishan Kant who were for India going nuclear. Because of that we became good friends and I used to give Krishan Kant questions to ask in the parliament.

Sarabhai knew that Kant was asking ‘my’ questions. So in 1971 during dinner he told me “Subbu you can call off your blood hound (Krishan Kant), I am going to Mururoa Atoll to witness a French nuclear test”. The Gandhian of ‘67 had changed enough to go and witness the tests. So I said “Vikram, do I draw conclusions from this”. He said you do what you like.
However till he died there was no reconciliation between him and the Trombay group. Sarabhai anyway will be remembered as the founder of our space programme. Then according to the version given to me by Ramanna in 1972 October during the convocation of IIT Bombay, Mrs Gandhi summoned Sethna and Ramanna and gave the go ahead for testing. Then they started designing the test. Preliminary work had already gone on but Sarabhai had suspended it. But Purnima reactor had given them some ideas about the behavior of neutrons and plutonium etc. Between 1972 and 74 they worked on it. Ramanna has recorded that even in 1974 people like P N Dhar and Haksar got cold feet and it was Mrs Gandhi who told them to go ahead.

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

SK: We already had a treaty with Soviet Union!
KS: Yes and also they could not forgive us for creating Bangladesh, a new country on the map which nobody had done after 1945! The sanctions started. That time we did not know that Pakistan had started its programme and was collecting money among the Islamic states.
When Janata government came in, Morarji Desai did not like nuclear explosion and did not like Ramanna (since he had led the test). He even denied that there was any nuclear test. He continued to hold that tonnes of explosives were buried and exploded!

SK: Is it because he thought Mrs Gandhi did it merely to over awe the domestic opposition and not for any strategic reasons?
KS: Yes. At that time US was trying to persuade us to adopt full scope safe guards—that is everything should come under safe guards. Mr Shankar who was Morarji Desai’s secy was in favour of it. So he told the Americans that we will examine it. So Americans were confident that India would accept it. Sethna was opposed to full scope safe guards. Morarji had said in the parliament that Americans are proposing it and there is nothing wrong in examining it. Actually I discovered through Sethna that the proposal was originated by Shankar and not Americans. So I got a copy of the note from the Americans to Sethna which called it “Mr Shankar’s proposal”. I got a photocopy of it and brought it to the Cabinet Secretary Nirmal Mukherjee that Morarji Desai can be cited for contempt of parliament since he had said in the parliament that it was an American proposal where as it was actually Shankar’s proposal. So the Cabinet Secy took it to Morarji.

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

SK: How did you reach that conclusion?
KS: We got intelligence information. We knew about A Q Khan coming back and starting Uranium enrichment etc. I told the cabinet secretary to take it to the five-member Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs. He did it and there was a discussion. I was not present but Nirmal Mukherjee told me since I had to write the minutes, that the decision to resume the programme was taken but it was not unanimous. Three had voted for it and two had opposed it. He asked me to guess who were the two that had opposed the programme. I said one was Morarji and that was correct but I could not figure out who was the second. It was Atal Bihari Vajpayee! H M Patel, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram were for going ahead with our nuclear programme.

Then the Morarji govt fell and Charan Singh came. Sethna said he can manage the whole programme himself. In fact he was trying to fill up director’s post in BARC so that Ramanna will not be able to get back but that was prevented. But when Mrs Gandhi came back she posted Ramanna back to Barc and he held both the posts. Then the programme was restarted by 1983 we were again ready.

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

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

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

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

SK: By that time were there no reports of Pakistani programme?
KS: Yes they were there but I was not in the government so I did not know about them. Thus he essentially stopped it. For some reason his relations with Raja Ramanna also deteriorated and he did not accept Ramanna’s recommendation of making P K Iyengar his successor. He selected M R Srinivasan, who had nothing to do with the weapons programme. So at that stage it was obvious that Rajiv was not interested in pursuing the weapons programme. He went to US he had a successful meeting with Reagan there was an agreement on science and technology but I do not think he was given any promise regarding civilian nuclear reactors. He was hoping for reactors from Russia and at that time Koodunkulam was under discussion.

However I am told that research went on and Rajiv did not stop it and then in 1988 he came out with his disarmament plan and put it before the UN and then to his horror he discovered that no one took any notice of it. He came back a disillusioned man and on the day of Air Force demo at Tilpat outside Delhi he said let us go ahead. Thus in ‘89 March or so he sanctioned the weapons programme.

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

However in a new book two American scientists have claimed that on 26th of May, 1990 actually the Chinese conducted a nuclear test for Pakistan. So they had come to dissuade Pakistan from doing it. Instead they put out the story about India-Pakistan. So Pakistan actually had a tested nuclear weapon by 1990 and not in 1998.

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

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

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

SK: Post 1998 how did this inclusion of India into the club take place? The French have claimed that they were responsible for it.
KS: Within two years even the Americans started being friendly to us. We realized that US was not hostile to us during the Kargil war, when Clinton did not side with Pakistan but sided with us. Then in 2000, Clinton had a very popular visit to India. To that extent the relationship with US started improving.

There was always a feeling among the major powers of the world, excepting China, that India was not an irresponsible power that it had already conducted a nuclear test in 1974 and had not rushed to build a nuclear arsenal. The Russians, French and even the Americans knew the China-Pakistan connection. How China had helped Pakistan develop nuclear weapons etc. The Indian compulsions were known.

The French president’s advisor did tell me that they took the initiative but that was after George Bush took office. Chirac rang him up. Russians have always been well disposed towards India. I have a feeling that during Bush—Vajpayee interaction they had already started developing the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership. We were asking the Americans to show progress in three things: nuclear, space and hitech. Those discussions were going on. The American administration at that time, with Colin Powell as Secretary of State, were not so favourably inclined to take such a major quantum jump. That came about in Bush’s second term, when Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State. They had in mind China’s dominance in Asia and the need to have some balance in Asia so when Man Mohan Singh met George W Bush in Oct 2004 during UNGA, they had a discussion but it is not quite clear whether Man Mohan Singh made any request regarding this or not. But definitely by 2005 March when Condi Rice came to India the Americans had made up their mind that they would help us in this respect. I would give a lot of credit for this to Bush and to a lesser extent to Condi Rice. These two really brought this about. Personally they were influenced by their idea of balance of power in Asia. They were not doing it because they liked us, but they were doing it for their own purposes. They could of course count on the help of France, Russia and Britain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SK: The issue however is: America can continue its pre-eminence only if it aligns strongly with India. Only then it will have access to man power, innovation, technology etc.
KS: You are quite right. That is why US needs India and India needs US. What would be the Chinese reaction to this alliance? China and US are not going to fight with each other. It is a rivalry for the top position in the world. I have seen many people say, why should we choose Americans why not Chinese after all we have a 5000 year old relationship etc etc. So I tell them, “Don’t worry about yourself but ask your son and grandson where they want to go to China or US and you will have the answer!”

Some say Harvard or Beijing. I would go even a step further. Where would you be able to build a Balaji temple or a Meenakshi temple in China, which you can in US. Democratic, English speaking and so on. Regarding China, it should be ‘if you are not friendly to us we will intensify our relationship with US. We are prepared to balance our relationship with both of you. But if you are not going to be civil to us we will intensify our collaboration with them’. So ultimately it has to be a three power game in the world. After all Russia, Japan, Europe are all aging. Even Chinese are now thinking of authorizing a second child. The kind of stupidities they have done are amazing! India does not have to worry about its rise.

Whether it is Obama or George Bush, US is not giving up ambition to build up an unrivalled military force in the world, which no single power or a combination of powers can challenge. They will always have that goal. Today 50% of the world’s military expenditure is incurred by the US and more than 50% of R&D expenditure of the world. On that I don’t think there will be any slack. I think Obama feels that dealing with all these nations, engaging them is a better strategy than confronting them. It is a sensible strategy. He is not doing it because US is overstretched. After all the reserve currency of the world is dollar. Rouble was never the reserve currency of the world!
The Americans rightly claim that they are also a soft power.

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

SK: So far Indian military has been quite defensive but it looks like it is modernizing now for force projection into Indian Ocean, Africa etc to defend Indian investments abroad.
KS: The Americans do not send their expeditionary force into all those countries where they own property or have business interests. They try to do it by influencing various groups in those countries. Therefore when we talk of our expansion etc we should also expand our ability to influence events in those countries. We should be able to befriend various parties, groups and interests in most of those countries. In future force projection by way of going and occupying a country is going to be less and less. Because you can defeat an army but the real problem is how do you occupy a country, as Iraq and Afghanistan show its futility. You could do it in 18th and 19th century, you could do it upto Hitler but not after that. Therefore people who talk about force projection don’t know what they are talking about. We are expanding our Navy for the security of shipping lanes, maritime terrorism, piracy etc it is not to threaten anybody.

But your economic power, your technological power commercial power those are things that make up real power. When the depression happened and America collapsed, it did not matter to China or Japan but today when American banks fail the Chinese are seriously affected. If the dollar goes down Chinese are worried. Not only that even if somebody catches flu in the US, the world has to be put on alert! That was not the case before.

There is no doubt that Americans are not only dominant but they think they are a power that can dictate terms to the rest of the world and that is objectionable. Of course that is not working. Increasingly countries are defying the Americans. We should not try to copy the “ugly American”. Already we have a reputation of doing that in our neighbourhood. That needs to be corrected. A day should come when Nepal. Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka (I am still leaving out Pakistan) would be able to have a common market even something like European Union.

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

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

SK: Thanks for your valuable time and insights.