Showing now: Bhakra Dam’s best-kept secret

The Ranganath Shiva temple in old Bilaspur, photographed in December 2004

Six decades after the dam was built, the temples of old Bilaspur town still emerge from the waters of Gobind Sagar when the reservoir level dips

If you are on your way to celebrate a white Christmas in Manali, slow down as you reach Bilaspur town and carefully look over the wide valley to your left. You will see a grassy, treeless ground. Grazing cattle and a few pointy mounds break its monotony. The mounds might remind you of temple spires, which they are. What you are seeing is the ghost of the old Bilaspur town, lost in the waters of Bhakra Dam’s Gobind Sagar reservoir more than 60 years ago.

Every winter, as the mountain snows that feed the Satluj river harden, the reservoir level falls till the river shrinks to its ancient girth below Bilaspur. By late December the ground is hard and dry enough to explore on foot. On a sunny day you can stand in its midst and imagine what the English explorer and veterinarian William Moorcroft saw when he passed by in the early 1800s.

“Bilaspur is not unpicturesquely situated on the left bank of the Satluj, which is here a rapid stream,” Moorcroft wrote in his journal. “The Raja’s dwelling, whitened and decorated with flowers in fresco, is neat but not large. His garden contains chiefly pear and apricot trees, rose bushes and beds of narcissus.”

Bilaspur was never a large town, nor the kingdom very rich. It stretched north to south on the Satluj’s left bank and occupied about 5sq km of area. The 1931 Census records 713 houses and 2,673 residents in the town. By the 1950s, when it was abandoned – or relocated uphill as New Bilaspur – the town had acquired a semblance of modern life.

There was the Shree Uma Club where women could read, and play table tennis and other games. A 500-seat cinema showed movies. The 1975 Gazetteer of Himachal Pradesh says, in its early days the hall management regularly told the audience not to panic on seeing the projected images and hearing the recorded sound. Bilaspur also had the Shri Bijai War Memorial women’s hospital with a clinical lab and operation theatre. It was built to commemorate the state’s contribution in WW-I.

All of these stood on the vast Sandhu-ka-Maidan, which also served as a makeshift airfield. “Twice have aircraft landed on the once exciting and vast Sandhu field,” the Gazetteer notes.

The town kept growing although the sword of Bhakra Dam had hung over it since at least the late 1930s. In the 1950s, when Dr M S Randhawa (of Green Revolution fame) visited the town he found the then king, Raja Anand Chand, had added a large Krishna temple beautifully decorated with mural paintings by the Bengali actor and artist Sarada Ukil.

Per an early plan, Bhakra Dam would have stood 152m tall. At this height, it would have partially submerged Bilaspur, 56km upstream. Eventually, it was decided to make the dam as high as was safely possible – about 225m from its lowest foundation. As a result, in 1963 Gobind Sagar stretched to a distance of almost 100km behind the dam. Bilaspur was obliterated.

Well, not immediately, nor entirely. Dr Randhawa paid another visit in October 1970. In his book, Travels in the Western Himalayas in Search of Paintings, he writes that while the town’s palaces were crumbling, “the stone temples still show remarkable vitality, and are intact, and would remain so for long. When the level of the lake rises, their tops could still be seen above the water level.”

He was right about the temples – more than 50 years and as many more submersions later, they are hanging on. Everything else is gone. There’s no sign of the palaces, nor of the stone and cement homes. It’s hard to believe that for 300 years this ground was the capital of a hill kingdom.

The Bilaspur royals trace their roots to Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh. The new kingdom they founded in the Himachal hills was called Kahlur, not Bilaspur, and until 1654 they ruled over it from other places. That year, Raja Dip Chand, a year into his reign and just 21 years old at the time, shifted his capital here.

The Gazetteer says he chose the site on the advice of four faqirs – two Hindu and two Muslim. It was already a place of worship on account of the Beas Gufa – sacred to the sage Vyas of Mahabharat fame – above the chosen ground. Legend has it that the sage used to winter here while spending the summer at Beas Kund – origin of the Beas river – near Rohtang Pass.

Dip Chand named his new capital Beaspur, but with the passage of time the name got corrupted to Bilaspur. He also built a palace called Dholar but it probably wasn’t the one that Moorcroft saw. Although the Kahlur rajas ruled from Bilaspur right up to Independence, the town was always at the Satluj’s mercy. It was washed away in a massive flood in 1762. In 1803, an earthquake caused a landslide that dammed the Satluj for some weeks. When the dam burst, Bilaspur was washed away again.

But the temples, some of which were already about a thousand years old, survived each time. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) says most of the shrines were built between the 10th and the 16th centuries and were dedicated to Shiva. Of these, the temple of Ranganath Shiva was the most important and an annual fair was held around it every May.

The royal family had its own special goddess: Rani Deomati, one of their ancestors in Chanderi. Pregnant at the time of her husband Raja Shib Chander’s death, she was dissuaded from performing sati on his pyre. Many years later, when she had seen her son installed on the throne, she performed the sacrifice.

The hill kingdoms had a tradition of honouring sati with stone memorials. Dr Randhawa, who was an art connoisseur, noted the presence of the Bilaspur temples but reserved special praise for its sati stones. “Some of the sati stones are carved in an artistic manner and are historical records of great importance...I felt that the sati stones deserved to be salvaged.”

Before the town was submerged, the deities housed in the ancient temples were removed to a new temple on higher ground. Plans to relocate the temples have been aired often, but not a stone has moved. With each passing year the temples are buried deeper in silt. If you want to see them, you will have to park your car by the road and walk down the hillside.

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When a queen jumped to her death from Delhi’s Qutub Minar

Nina Grosup-Karatsonyi, photo from Theatermuseum

Before its doors closed to visitors in 1981, the Qutub Minar was not only a tourist magnet but also Delhi’s suicide point. On December 9, 1946, Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala jumped to her death from its top

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By December 1946, the tall, slim woman with the wide-set eyes was a familiar sight at New Delhi’s Maidens Hotel. She had been staying there for about a month. Every day, she took her dogs out walking. But on the morning of the second Monday – December 9 – she came out of her suite alone, hailed a taxi and sped towards the Qutub Minar.

It was a long drive, the 13th-century tower – Delhi’s tallest building until then and for many years afterwards – lay outside the capital, about 20km away.

On arriving at the Minar, the woman left her handbag with the driver and started up the stairs. She must have been gone many minutes because the tower is over 72 metres tall – taller than a 20-storey apartment building – and not an easy climb even for someone in fine fettle.

The waiting driver might have stood leaning against his car, head bent backwards to see her emerge in one of the Minar’s balconies. He couldn’t have seen the look on her face when she appeared at the very top, breathless perhaps. But then, he would have frozen in shock as she jumped to death.

The Minar’s diameter grows from 9 feet at the top to 47 feet at the base. Some accounts say she fell on the edge of the second balcony. But newspaper reports of the day say her body was found at the base of the Minar.

A woman so beautiful that she had wowed Vienna’s elite on her first major stage appearance 11 years earlier, now lay smashed beyond recognition. Who was she? The contents of her handbag revealed she was Rani Tara Devi, 33-year-old estranged wife of Kapurthala’s ageing maharaja, Jagatjit Singh.

After a post-mortem next morning, Tara Devi was buried at the Nicholson Cemetery near Kashmere Gate in Delhi, and forgotten.

A charmer on stage

But Tara Devi wasn’t her real name. Before the maharaja married her sometime in 1941 or 1942, she was just a foreign national staying in India as his guest. A Kapurthala state declaration submitted to the British in 1940 mentions her name as Engenie Marie Grosupova, which might have been a typist’s mistake. Eugenie is the more likely name.

The rani was a Czech national, born on January 22, 1914. Before accompanying the maharaja to India shortly before WW-II started, she had been a promising new dancer on Vienna’s most famous stage, the Burgtheater. In his book ‘Maharani’, Diwan Jarmani Dass, who claimed to have been a minister in the royal families of Patiala and Kapurthala, says she was the illegitimate daughter of a Hungarian count. Dr Leon Pistol, who had been her guardian in Vienna from the age of 4 to 20 years, also hinted at this when he told the Canadian paper Photo Journal that she was the daughter of “a very wealthy member of the Hungarian nobility”.

In 1935, Eugenie had landed a meaty role as Anitra in the drama, Peer Gynt. She made at least two appearances, on June 8 and September 3 that year, and both times the press admired her for her beauty, femininity and dancing.

Austrian papers such as Die Stunde mentioned her as Nina Grosup-Karatsonyi. After her suicide, papers in America, Europe and Australia also used the name Nina Grosup, so did Pistol. So, Nina is what we’ll call her for the rest of this story.

A royal romance

After making a splash on the stage in 1935, Nina disappeared from it swiftly. In April 1947, four months after her suicide, Pistol told Photo Journal that the maharaja had been present at the Burgtheater during one of her performances. “Immediately after the performance, Nina’s mother called me to tell me that the maharaja wanted to bring them all back (to India) with him,” the article written in French says.

Another article published in the Sydney edition of The World’s News on August 23, 1947 also says, “On the opening night she received an ovation from the crowd, and a huge bouquet of roses from the maharaja of Kapurthala, who had been admiring the dancer from his box.”

Pistol said he opposed the maharaja’s offer because Nina had signed a three-year contract with the Burgtheater, but “the suitor-royal simply shrugged his shoulders and offered to buy out the contract in question for $20,000.”

Soon after this, Nina, her then 46-year-old mother Marie Grosupova, and a 64-year-old maid/governess named Antonia Kaura, “followed the Maharajah to Paris, London, and finally, to India”.

It’s difficult to verify Pistol’s claims in detail but the International Herald Tribune of June 28, 1938 describes a luncheon hosted by the maharaja at the George V hotel in Paris at which ‘Mme Grosup’ (Marie), ‘Mlle Grosup’ (Nina) and ‘Dr Pistol’ were among the guests. Clearly, Pistol’s story had a kernel of truth.

By the time WW-II started late in 1939, the Grosups and their maid were already installed at the Jagatjit Palace in Kapurthala. Nina and the maharaja weren’t married but Dass says the 67-year-old ruler was lavishing all kinds of expensive gifts on the 25-year-old former dancer. There must be some truth to this also as after her death, her possessions in the hotel suite were valued at many thousands of dollars.

When in February 1940, the British government asked the princely states to submit a list of ‘enemy subjects’ residing in their territory, Kapurthala declared the Grosup women (Czechoslovakia was under German occupation) were “guests of his Highness the Maharaja of Kapurthala”.

Unhappy marriage

The maharaja was well-known in Europe and America and his engagements were regularly covered. Whole pages were written about him, so strangely his marriage to Nina doesn’t find a mention abroad. It’s true the press’s attention was occupied by the war, but still to ignore one of their favourites in this manner seems odd.

Maybe, the maharaja deliberately kept his sixth marriage low-profile, but it is a fact that Nina and he were married, and she was given the Indian name Tara Devi, because the question of “the grant of a British passport to Rani Tara Devi (formally Miss Grosup, a Czechoslovak citizen) wife of His Highness the Maharaja of Kapurthala” did come up in 1942.

It seemingly wasn’t a happy marriage for both parties. News reports after her suicide said they had separated in 1945 and Nina had been living alone. Pistol said she had even intended to visit America in December to settle there. The World’s News article said she had asked Pistol to buy her a house near New York City.

But much as she wanted to, Nina could not leave India. News of her death was covered well abroad but played down in India. The Madras edition of a prominent paper put it on its second page, below “Madras-Colombo rowing contest postponed,” and “Beedi workers’ strike in Malabar & S Kanara”.

Suicide or murder?

From the very first, Pistol said he suspected foul play in Nina’s death. He alleged that a month before she died, she had written to him saying, “Every day when I go out with my dogs somebody is asking me questions and follows me. I don’t know what he wants. I think it’s someone – a detective. But don’t worry.” She had also been jittery since her mother’s “mysterious death” a year earlier.

Pistol claimed Nina had left behind a fortune amounting to $150,000, including at least $100,000 in jewellery, “40 coats of furs and 52 trunks full of clothes”, all of which were his to inherit.

“I will not rest as long as it is not clear whether the mother and governess died of natural causes and the maharanee committed suicide or whether all three were murdered,” he is quoted in The Bombay Chronicle of September 22, 1948.

The National Archives of India has a record of an “Enquiry by Mr Leon Pistol, guardian of late Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala, regarding her death in 1946,” filed in 1948. Four years later, in 1952, Dr Pistol also sent a request to the PM “for assistance and advice regarding investigation into the mysterious death in 1946 of Eugenie Grosup, popularly known as Rani Tara Devi of Kapurthala”. But by then, the maharaja had died and the rani, whom few knew in her lifetime in India, lay completely forgotten.

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The Jagatjit Palace in Kapurthala

Nina in her Anitra costume, 1935

How India tried to stop baby boom with calendars, peas

Instead of promoting contraceptives, newly independent India toyed with impractical family planning ideas for several years

Photo source 

Wednesday brought the news that India’s total fertility rate has slipped to 2. “Population explosion” is officially over. Part of the credit for this goes to the long-running family planning programme, but few know that it made a floundering start in the 1950s.

In 1951, we were a nation of 361 million people – a billion less than now, but the government was already concerned about population growth. “The increase of population in India constitutes a big national problem,” health minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur told Parliament on December 20, 1956.

The government was keen to do something about it, but didn’t want to begin “any countrywide scheme of control on a matter like this without a very careful study of all factors involved,” Kaur had said on July 29, 1952. Yet, all it had done until then was set up three centres for pilot studies on a birth control measure that both scientists and planners did not find feasible.

Rhythm’s gonna get you

The government’s pet birth control measure was called the ‘rhythm method’. Instead of contraceptives it required knowledge of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Couples had to take a course in which they were told to have intercourse on days when ovulation was least likely.

Even in 1952 experts spoke against the rhythm method. By Kaur’s own admission: “Some of the women’s organisations have given their opinion. They are in favour of the use of mechanical contraceptives.”

The birth-control pill was not available then but condoms and foam tablets were. Did the government try to popularise these? Asked whether the government intended to subsidise contraceptives for the poor, Kaur said on September 13, 1954: “No, government is not supplying contraceptives to anybody.”

Nor did the government give grants to institutions and experts for research in family planning. Its entire focus was on the complicated rhythm method for which only three training centres  –  two in New Delhi and one in Ramanagaram, Mysore  – had been set up.

The Ramanagaram centre, for example, covered 14 villages with altogether 941 married women under the age of 40. Of them, only 712 enrolled in the course with their husbands. From the time the programme started in September-October 1952, to the end of June 1953, “only 385 menstruating women had been actively followed for various lengths of time.”

(A ‘Rythmeter’ chart used for fertility planning in the US, in the 1940s. Photo source)

The rhythm method was impractical any way you looked at it. “Tentative advice on the rhythm method is given after the examination of three menstrual cycles. Final rhythm is worked out on the basis of six menstrual cycles,” the government said. To know their safe dates, couples had to use aids like beads and calendar cards, and many were not happy using them. Women also did not like the invasion of their privacy for drawing up rhythm charts.

No regard for facts

Ignoring the difficulties, the government continued promoting the rhythm method. During a discussion on September 13, 1954, MP Violet Alva cited an expert’s advice that it “was not acceptable to the countryside and that some other method had to be thought of...”

The health minister replied: “Many people say many things. The government should consider them all and see what is feasible for the country.”

Dr Seeta Parmanand, another MP, asked, “What is the percentage of people, both doctors and social workers, who are in favour of the rhythm method?”

The minister said, “Government has no information as to what proportion favours which method.” Nor did the government have data about the effectiveness of the rhythm method.

From dates to peas

Instead of adopting straightforward birth control measures, the government then wasted more time and money on ideas like developing oral contraceptives from field peas because a Mumbai-based scientist had shown that pea extract caused abortions in animals when taken in very high doses.

It also released a movie titled ‘Planned Parenthood’ in English and six other languages, and started a free magazine, ‘Family Planning News,’ with a circulation of 10,000 copies, but neither campaign made an impact.

A different tune

For six years, the government stubbornly shrugged off criticism of the rhythm method, and then gave it a quiet burial. On September 16, 1958, when Dr Parmanand asked, “Whether the experiment on rhythmic method of family planning has been stopped,” the new health minister, D P Karmarkar, replied, “Experiments exclusively on rhythmic method have been stopped.”

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How India taught herself to make good pens and ink

In the summer of 1961, Government of India was waiting for an expert from the United States. Not an agricultural scientist or a meteorologist but someone with knowledge of the fountain pen industry. India had completely stopped importing fountain pens in 1958, and by 1960 domestic production of pens had risen to 12 million pieces in the organised sector and 10 million in cottage industries. We made enough pens for our needs  ( although nibs were 100% imported)  but not always to an acceptable quality. So in 1961, Government of India turned to the US for a quality control expert.

It seems strange now that a country that frequently sends the world’s satellites into space couldn’t make good pens just half a century ago, but this is a part of India’s growing-up story.

Forget pens, we even needed help to make ink in the early years after Independence. By 1957 –  10 years after Independence  –  the import of ink had been banned for the same reason that foreign cars weren’t allowed in India. We wanted to be self-dependent in everything and save precious foreign exchange.




In 1957, India’s installed capacity for ink was 3.5 million boxes containing a dozen 2-ounce bottles each, while the demand was for only 0.9 million boxes. Still, foreign brands outnumbered the domestic ink makers. Pilot, Waterman, Quink, Stephens’ and Swan were the five foreign ink brands made and sold in India at the time. Of these, Pilot and Quink even had equity participation while the other three were made under technical collaboration. The four important homegrown brands were Camel, Sulekha, Harihar and Nuluk.

All of the ink factories in India imported some of their raw material like methylene blue, and the foreign collaborations also brought in their respective secret sauces.

Coming back to fountain pens, India used to import them from the US, UK, Australia, West Germany, France, Japan, etc, but to encourage domestic manufacturing, the government had decided that pens that cost less than Rs 25 apiece would not be imported. This spurred the growth of factories in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and the town of Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh. By the mid-1950s there were 12 Indian manufacturers, of whom Rajahmundry-based Ratnam & Sons were the oldest and most famous.

But the quality of most early Indian manufacturers was iffy, so in 1956 the government approved two foreign collaborations — with Pilot and Waterman, respectively. The government hoped that the joint venture factories would make world-class pens for as little as Rs 10 apiece, but in a few years it felt the need to improve quality across the industry and called in an American technical expert.



The manufacture of ballpoint pens started even later, although the foreign maker of ‘Biro’ pens had offered to set up a factory as early as 1953. The government had rejected that offer because the company wanted 49% stake in the joint venture and a high percentage of royalty.

The first approval to make ballpoint pen ink in India was granted in 1962 for a joint venture between Dhirajlal Mohanlal Joshi, a businessman based in Rajkot, Gujarat, and M/s Formulabs Inc of Escondido, California. Asked whether the ink couldn’t have been made in India without a foreign collaboration, the government frankly admitted it was not possible.

Today, banks recommend that you sign cheques with a ballpoint to prevent fraud, but back in the 1960s ballpoint pens were not allowed for many uses in India. You could fill out a money order with a ballpoint but the payee had to sign with a fountain pen. Bills, government cheques and endorsements made on government cheques all had to be signed with fountain pens.

The rules have been completely rewritten in the years since.

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I first published this article on my Medium blog, under the handle @pastmaster77, on October 16, 2016. Two days later, I posted it on my Times of India blog. Both blogs don't exist now but here's proof the article is mine: https://web.archive.org/web/20161018041712/http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/paperweight/how-india-scripted-its-pen-and-ink-story/

Why Qutub Minar has been closed since 1981

45 visitors, most of them students, died in a stampede inside the minar on December 4, 1981. Demands to reopen the monument have been made over the years, but no government wants to risk the blame for another tragedy

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Long ago, you could climb to the top of Delhi’s Qutub Minar. In the early 1850s, British agent Thomas Metcalfe’s daughter Emily used to take “a basketful of oranges to the top of the Kutub Minar, 283 feet high, to indulge in a feast in that seclusion” (her papa disapproved of women eating cheese, mangoes and oranges; and she got the minar’s height wrong – it’s 238 feet).

A century later, the tower was still open. Football lore has it that Delhi owes its lone Santosh Trophy triumph, in 1944, to the Qutub. On the morning of the final, a Delhi official allegedly took the visiting Bengal side sightseeing to the minar, and told them it was impossible to climb its 379 steps without a rest. Six Bengal players trudged upstairs to prove him wrong. They returned with legs so sore that Delhi beat Bengal 2-0.

The free run ended a few years later because of all the suicides that happened at the Qutub. One of the more sensational cases was that of a rani of Kapurthala – a Czech woman named Nina Grosup, a.k.a. Evgenia Grosupova and Tara Devi – who jumped to her death in December 1946. So, in the early 1950s the government barred access beyond the minar’s first balcony. It did not affect the suicide rate, though, because even the first balcony is as high as a 10-storey apartment building.

Picnic turns calamity

Like any other Friday, December 4, 1981 was a very busy day at the minar. Entry to the Qutub compound used to be free on Fridays then, and there was no ticket for going up either, so schools and colleges scheduled their Qutub picnics for Friday mornings. It was the last time the general public saw the monument from inside.

By 11am, busloads of students and other visitors were inside the spiral staircase that leads up to the minar’s first balcony. By all accounts – even the government admitted – there were far more visitors than could be safely accommodated.

Around 11.30am – reports from that day say – there was a power failure, and the lights inside went out. The minar has large vents at regular intervals for air and light, but as the visitors who were close to the outer wall pressed against it for safety, they cut out the daylight. Then, as the scared crowd tried to exit desperately, a stampede occurred. Within minutes, dozens of people lay dead and injured in the darkness.

Anil Kumar, a student of Delhi’s Aurobindo College at the time, was inside the minar with seven of his friends when the stampede occurred. He told The Times of India they were descending the dark stairs in single file when they suddenly “found themselves sliding down uncontrollably”. He survived with chest injuries.

Manjulal, a two-year-old boy from Faridabad, was probably the luckiest visitor. He had come to the minar with his parents Vimla Rani and JP Gulati. As chaos erupted, he “glided over hundreds of wailing and screaming people in the dark stairs...and landed outside without any injury after being passed on from hand to hand,” The Times reported.

Trapped behind jammed doors

The minar gate had heavy steel doors that opened inwards. As the number of people inside swelled, the chowkidar (watchman) had pulled them shut. When hundreds of people tried to barge outside at once, the doors jammed against the frame. Rescuers couldn’t enter through the gate because of the mass of people behind it.

Fortunately, a scaffolding had been built behind the minar to carry out repairs, and local hawkers and tourist guides used it to enter the minar through the vents in the outer wall. They extricated many survivors and bodies over an hour. Some Sikh youths undid their turbans and used them to lift buckets of water for the shocked survivors inside the minar.

By the time police and the fire brigade arrived, the dead had been laid out in the Qutub lawns and the injured rushed to AIIMS and Safdarjung hospitals in the tourist buses that had brought them in the morning. At 3.30pm, then home minister Giani Zail Singh informed Lok Sabha that 45 persons had been killed and 21 injured.

Journalists who looked inside the minar after the evacuation reported seeing books, sweaters, cameras and handbags everywhere. These were piled up at the minar gate in the evening. The Times of India of December 5 reported: “The sides of the staircase were splattered with blood as people were ruthlessly battered against the solid walls.”

A team of 12 doctors formed to do the autopsies finished its work around 1.30am on December 5. They attributed most of the deaths to suffocation and trampling, not bleeding, and few corpses had external injuries.

What caused the stampede?

The pitch dark minar must have made the people nervous, but that alone would not have started a stampede. Survivors that day gave different accounts of what had happened. Some said a group of unruly boys had misbehaved with women tourists in the dark, and the stampede started when those women tried to rush downstairs.

Others said someone had slipped in the dark, and set off a chain reaction while trying to regain balance. Some said there had been a scuffle when thieves tried to pick pockets in the dark, and that had led to the stampede.

A tragedy waiting to happen

Next day, New Delhi additional commissioner of police Nikhil Kumar denied receiving any complaint of molestation, but news reports from the time say two tourists from New Zealand, Jackie and Marie, had alleged they were molested. One of them was seen leaving the Qutub compound wearing a borrowed lungi (sarong) and shirt. Later, district and sessions judge Jagdish Chandra’s inquiry report in the case also made a mention of their harassment.

In the Rajya Sabha, the Opposition alleged police protection and political patronage to “local goondas” had caused the tragedy, but molestation inside the minar wasn’t a new thing. Twenty-four years earlier, on November 21, 1956, an MP had asked then deputy education minister Dr MM Das (the archaeology department used to be under the education minister) in Lok Sabha if he knew women were molested and pockets picked in the minar’s “dark and dingy passage”. The minar lacked electric lights those days, and the minister had replied they weren’t needed as the minar had “been like that for 750 years”.

Overcrowding was also an old problem, especially on holidays. There had been another stampede inside the minar on August 15, 1978 when a man had fainted from suffocation in the packed staircase. Twelve people were injured that day, six of them seriously.

After the December 1981 tragedy, education minister Sheila Kaul told Lok Sabha a system of crowd-control had been in place since the 1950s, when tickets were introduced at the Qutub. There are 155 steps up to the first balcony, so 300 visitors were allowed in at a time. They walked up single-file, looked around from the balcony, which had space for 40-50 persons, and then descended single-file. When 50 visitors exited the tower, 50 more were sent inside.

Ensuring that the tourists ascended and descended the steps – which are about 5 feet wide at the base and narrow to 4 feet at the balcony – in an orderly double spiral was crucial for safety, but on Fridays and other holidays this was impossible. By some accounts, more than 500 people were inside the minar on December 4, 1981. Kaul initially said the stampede had occurred because about 60 boys from a college in Nuh, Haryana had barged into the minar disregarding the chowkidaar’s warning about crowding.

‘Qutub is falling…’

Just as the police denied reports of molestation, the Delhi municipal corporation at first said there had been no power outage at the minar between 10.50am and 12.30pm on December 4. A truck had dashed against an electricity pole, tripping power at 9.15am but supply had been restored by 10.50am, it said.

But the 49-page Chandra Commission report found power failure to be one of the major causes of the tragedy, and held Delhi Electricity Supply Undertaking (DESU) responsible for it.

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was held equally culpable for the “very bad and dangerous condition” of the steps. The steps had “dangerous depressions and contours” because they had never been repaired, it said.

The inquiry commission concluded that while the girls from New Zealand had rushed downstairs to escape the molesters, the real stampede had occurred when another girl had slipped near the minar’s 8th ventilator and some boys had raised a false alarm: “Qutub is falling...go down, go down.”

This account agrees with what BD Singh, MP from Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh, told Lok Sabha on December 7, 1981. He had visited the minar on the evening of December 4 and found that all the casualties had occurred roughly between the 40th and the 60th steps.

Will it open again?

The Chandra Commission had recommended better lighting inside the minar, paid entry, and restricting access to 100 people at a time. It had also asked ASI to repair the minar’s steps before reopening it. The repairs were made over a year, and in 1983 ASI proposed reopening the minar to visitors but the government declined.

Twenty years later, Prime Minister AB Vajpayee’s culture minister Jagmohan directed ASI to open the minar up to the third storey, but this time the agency said the steps above the first storey would need repairs. The minar remains closed, and it seems unlikely that it will ever open again.

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A vent in the minar's wall 

A similar scaffolding stood that day

The minar doors open inwards

Hindustan Times front page on 5/12/81 

It's time to kill the ghost of Barog

Barog tunnel on the Kalka-Shimla railway counts among India’s most haunted places. A British officer’s ghost is said to dwell in it. But the legend of this officer is suspiciously short on detail


Barog in Himachal Pradesh is famous for the longest tunnel on the Kalka-Shimla railway, but of late youtubers and trekkers have been descending on it to see an abandoned tunnel and the grave of the British engineer after whom the town is supposedly named.

It’s said that Col Barog – nobody seems to know his first name – was in charge of building tunnel 33. Because it is a very long tunnel – 3,752 feet long – he started digging it from both ends, but his alignment was wrong and the two parts didn’t meet.

Barog, the story says, was censured and fined a rupee. Humiliated, he walked up to the mouth of the flawed tunnel with his dog, and shot himself. Oddly, he was buried there, not in Dagshai, or Solan, or Kasauli, or Subathu. While the story is short on detail, even Barog’s “grave” has ghosted. Nobody has seen it in the past 15 years, at least. A team of Unesco observers that tried to find it in 2007 returned disappointed.

But the story doesn’t end there. While the place was named Barog in the colonel’s memory, and he took up residence there as a ghost, an Indian diviner named Baba Bhalku “helped” the British railway engineers find the right alignment of the tunnel. Full of gratitude for his service, the viceroy is said to have honoured him. Shimla city even has a railway museum named after Bhalku.

Barog before Barog

It’s a fantastic story waiting to be made into a movie, but there is a problem – Barog was called Barog even before work on the tunnel started. This excerpt from The Bombay Gazette of August 14, 1899 is proof:

“A detailed and final reconnaissance for the Simla-Kalka railway has now been completed by Mr Harrington (the chief engineer)….The proposed alignment will necessitate the construction of three important tunnels, viz. Koti spur...Barogh...and Tara Devi.”

Construction of the Kalka-Simla line didn’t start until the summer of 1900. And Barog figures again in a report from The Engineer of May 25, 1900:

“The first sod of the mountain railway from Kalka to Simla has just been turned….The heaviest parts of the undertaking are two large tunnels which have to be made….The second is the Barog tunnel, under the Solon Hill, about halfway to Simla.”

No mention of mistake, or delay

The same report in The Engineer says, “the tunnels are being taken in hand first as they will require upwards of two years to complete…” So, if tunnelling started in May 1900, the earliest it could have finished was in May-June 1902.

A report in The Railway Engineer of December 1902 says the two “headings” of the Barog tunnel were to have met on October 24, 1902 – comfortably close to the original estimate. Yes, the project missed the date, but even in December 1902 there was no sense of alarm or panic over the “delay”.

The report explains that work on the Barog tunnel was taking long because of natural obstacles. For example, its course lay through sandstone punctuated with springs: “The miners having had to work at times under deluges of water.”

Now, if the delay had been on account of a wrong alignment, would the press have glossed over it? Especially the railway and engineering journals? Wrong alignment would have meant a loss of many months, if not years, of effort.

Bhalku or compressed air?

In the legend, Bhalku pulls the tunnel project together with his sixth sense, but news reports from that time show it was a technologically advanced operation. In its May 11, 1901 issue, Indian Engineering talks about a “powerful compressed-air plant now being started” at the Barog tunnel.

Nineteen months later, The Railway Engineer of December 1902 confirms: “The work has been carried through with the aid of heavy air-compressing machinery got out expressly from England.”

Tunneling was only half the work. The tunnel also had to be lined with masonry, a slow job. Three years after work started on the tunnel, The Bombay Gazette of June 15, 1903 said, “The masonry lining of the great Barog tunnel is completed throughout all but 500 feet of its length.”

Not once does the name of Bhalku appear in these reports. It’s unlikely the press would have denied him credit just because he wasn’t white. It’s too good a story – a native diviner deciding the alignment of a railway tunnel – to suppress for racial prejudice.

Radio silence on colonel

The deadline for the Kalka-Simla railway was October 1903, and passenger services started on November 9, 1903. There was no delay. The Barog tunnel was completed within the overall project schedule. Coming back to Col Barog, is it possible that his “mistake” didn’t upset the project at all?

Also, why is there no report about his suicide in the papers from that time? A British colonel killing himself in India would have been a big deal. It would have been reported in not only India but also the UK and Australia. Yet, you find no mention of a Col Barog anywhere. He does not figure even in the project plans. Other people are listed in charge of work at Barog, Dharampur and Solan throughout.

Hence the question: how real is the ghost of Barog?

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The ghost of Col Barog wants some answers

Legend has it that the engineer tasked with building the Barog tunnel on the Kalka-Shimla railway line shot himself after he got the alignment wrong. With frequent repetition, the story has passed into history. But where are the sources to prove it?

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There’s a town called Barog in Wales, and there’s another Barog on the road to Shimla in Himachal Pradesh. The Indian Barog is known for the longest railway tunnel on the Kalka-Shimla route, but in recent years it has become famous for a ghost – the ghost of a British officer named Col Barog.

The story is so good, you wonder why a film hasn’t been made on it. If you haven’t heard the story already, here’s a summary:

When the British started work on the Kalka-Shimla railway, the job of building the longest tunnel fell to Col Barog. Because it was a very long tunnel – more than a kilometre in length – he commenced digging it from both sides. But his alignment was off, the two arms didn’t meet.

The officer was embarrassed, and the government humiliated him some more by fining him a rupee for doing a shoddy job. What did the colonel do? He went up to the mouth of the flawed tunnel on the Shimla side, with his dog, and shot himself.

Thus far, the story has an engineering challenge, failure, humiliation and tragedy. But it gets better. It is said that Barog was buried at the mouth of his tunnel, and the place was named Barog in his memory. Redemption.

Next, an Indian diviner named Baba Bhalku/Balkoo from a village near Chail steps into the picture. He helps the British railway engineers find the right alignment through the weak rock of the hills. Without him, the tunnel could not have been built. The viceroy honours Bhalku. Shimla city now has a railway museum named after him. So, there’s national pride too.

And finally, when all the others who worked on the tunnel have passed, the good colonel decides to stay on in Barog as a ghost. He haunts the tunnel. In a good way, though. He is said to be a friendly ghost. Affable. Causes no trouble.

Tunnel fever

The Barog story has been told for many years. I found it online 20 years ago after I saw the railway tunnel (the one in use) for the first time. And I believed it. Not the bit about the ghost, but the failure and suicide didn’t seem doubtful.

Judged by the increase in YouTube videos on the subject, many others believe it too. Weekend trekkers have been making trips to see Barog’s abandoned tunnel and his grave. Oddly, everybody reports the grave has now disappeared. In 2007, a team of Unesco observers returned after failing to find Barog’s grave.

Was there a body?

In 2021, the internet makes it easy for you to search old books, newspapers, and government papers. I have devoted many hours over the past month searching for Col Barog. My quest began out of curiosity. I wanted to know more about this interesting officer’s case, but today I doubt there was a Col Barog in Barog, and that he killed himself.

The main problem with the story is that Barog was called Barog before work on the tunnel started. So, it could not have been named after an officer who shot himself on failing to complete the tunnel. Here’s an excerpt from The Bombay Gazette of August 14, 1899:

“A detailed and final reconnaissance for the Simla-Kalka railway has now been completed by Mr Harrington (the chief engineer)….The proposed alignment will necessitate the construction of three important tunnels, viz. Koti spur...Barogh...and Tara Devi.” In reports of that time Barog, Solan and Harrington are often spelt as Barogh, Solon and Harington. Shimla is uniformly ‘Simla’.

Actual construction of the Kalka-Simla line started in the summer of 1900. And Barog figures again in a report from The Engineer of May 25, 1900:

“The first sod of the mountain railway from Kalka to Simla has just been turned….The heaviest parts of the undertaking are two large tunnels which have to be made….The second is the Barog tunnel, under the Solon Hill, about halfway to Simla. The tunnels are being taken in hand first as they will require upwards of two years to complete…”

No mention of mistake

Let’s say work on the Barog tunnel started in May 1900. From the beginning, it was known that it would take more than two years to build. The earliest it could have been finished was in May-June 1902. Now, if Col Barog had dug in the wrong direction and realised his mistake only when the tunnel’s two parts didn’t meet, the project would have been delayed by many months, if not years.

Instead, The Railway Engineer of December 1902 reports the two “headings” of the Barog tunnel were to have met on October 24, 1902 – comfortably close to the original estimate. So, right up to September or October, or even December 1902, there was no sense of alarm. No panic. Nor any reports of a “mistake” leading to delay.

The same report explains that work on the Barog tunnel was taking long because of natural obstacles. For example, its course lay through sandstone punctuated with springs: “The miners having had to work at times under deluges of water.”

By then, the rate of advance (of the two halves together) had increased to 50-70 feet every week. The officers and workers were paid a weekly bonus to speed up work, and they toiled “day and night”.

“Tons of dynamite have been used,” the report adds.

Is Baba Bhalku real?

Legend has it that after Col Barog’s suicide, Baba Bhalku pulled the project together and told the railway engineers where to dig. But reports from that time show it was quite a technologically advanced operation. In its May 11, 1901 issue, Indian Engineering talks about a “powerful compressed-air plant now being started” at the Barog tunnel.

The Railway Engineer of December 1902 also says, “The work has been carried through with the aid of heavy air-compressing machinery got out expressly from England.”

And tunneling was only half the work. The tunnels also had to be lined with masonry, which cost considerable time and money. Three years after work started on the tunnel, it was nearing completion. The Bombay Gazette of June 15, 1903 says, “The masonry lining of the great Barog tunnel is completed throughout all but 500 feet of its length.” The entire tunnel is 3,752 feet long.

Not once does the name of Bhalku appear in these reports. It’s unlikely that the press would deny him credit just because he wasn’t white. It’s too good a story – a native diviner deciding the alignment of a railway tunnel – to suppress out of racial prejudice.

Other questions

The original deadline for the Kalka-Simla railway was October 1903, and it opened in November that year. There was no delay at all. The Barog tunnel was completed within the overall project deadline. It took longer than originally anticipated, but that was because of the unexpected difficulties encountered.

Coming back to Col Barog, if he did shoot himself at the mouth of his wrongly aligned tunnel, why was he buried there? Why not in Subathu or Dagshai or Kasauli? There were Christian cemeteries all around.

Also, why is there no report about his suicide in the papers from that time? A colonel killing himself would have been a big deal. It would have been reported not only in India but also the UK and Australia. Yet, you find no mention of a Col Barog anywhere. Besides, he’s not mentioned even in the project plans. Other people are listed in charge of work at Barog, Dharampur and Solan throughout.

Finally, if you have visited the other tunnel, rather cave, you would have noticed it’s not big enough for a train to pass. It’s quite low in fact, somewhat like the mouth of a coal mine. And maybe that’s what it was, for as the Punjab State Gazetteer for 1904 says, “In tunnelling the Barog hill section of the Kalka-Simla railway a coal seam was also seen.”

Trains those days ran on coal, and a coal mine halfway to Simla would have been very useful. But that’s just conjecture. I don’t know what the other tunnel was for, but I find it hard to believe it had anything to do with the Barog railway tunnel.

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When summer meant a ban on mithai

In the 1970s, Uttar Pradesh had a law that gave a police officer the power to “enter and search any place or premises where he has reason to believe that…”

It wasn’t about curbing gunrunning, or bootlegging, or prostitution. The ‘UP Milk and Milk Products Control Order’ was all about preventing the diversion of milk to other states, and for other uses, such as the production of paneer and mithai in the summer months.

Nor was UP alone in this. In August 1965, West Bengal had banned the manufacture of dairy sweets in Kolkata through the West Bengal Channa Sweets Control Order. Punjab’s milk products control order had come into force in June 1966. The Centre had issued ‘Delhi, Meerut and Bulandshahr Milk and Milk Products Control Order’ in 1969. And in Delhi, wedding hosts weren’t allowed to serve sweets made of “khoya, chhana, rabri and khurchan to more than 25 persons at a time at social functions,” following an order passed in 1965.

All of these orders were meant to fight the severe shortage of milk in the summer months when fodder and water for milch animals were scarce. Even otherwise, India was a milk-starved country in the first few decades after Independence. During 1952-55, hardly half a cup of milk (126g) was available per person, per day. In some states, the average daily availability was just 30-50 grams per person.

A large part of the country’s milk requirement was fulfilled with imported – often donated – milk powder. On March 29, 1967, this discussion occurred in the Rajya Sabha:

Niren Ghosh, MP from West Bengal: “There is dearth of milk powder supply in West Bengal. As a result, the entire milk supply scheme is going to collapse next month, and the children and the mothers are not going to get milk.”

S Chandrasekhar, minister of health and family planning: “I know, sir…all the available supplies are being directed to Bihar because of the drought situation…even in Bihar, since the supplies are limited, they are being directed for the use of vulnerable groups of population like nursing mothers and infants and young children.”

So, the policymakers of that era had a reason to ban the diversion of milk for all “non-essential” uses, including mithai. “Government are aware that manufacturers of milk sweets will be adversely affected. But milk sweets are a luxury product…” minister of state for agriculture Annasaheb Shinde said in May 1969.

Happily, Operation Flood was successful, and at the start of the 1990s you find minister of state for agriculture K C Lenka telling Lok Sabha: “now the ban is on conversion of milk into milk powder and condensed milk only.”

Three more decades have passed, and few remember those summers of milk shortage. Now, if a cop knocks at your door, you know he won’t say, “Got milk?”.

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From AIR to Doordarshan, how India got hooked on TV

For about a decade before cable TV caught on in the 1990s, city roofs had turned into a forest of aluminium fronds. Each house in every building had its own ‘tree’ on the roof. You needed them to receive Doordarshan (DD) signals, although if you lived close enough to a TV station an aluminium clothes hanger worked fine.

Those old antennas were veritable lightning rods. You were supposed to unplug the telly in a storm. They were also directional. A strong wind or even the burden of perched pigeons could disorient them, leaving you staring at an eruption of white and grey dots – colours, if you had a colour TV. The accompanying noise was unbearable. You ran upstairs, leaving someone in the room as a guide.

“Now?”
“No.”
“Now?”
“No.”
“Now?”
“A little more… That’s it. Stop, stop, stop.”

The whole building knew you had set your antenna right. You could go back to your Sunday evening movie, or Wimbledon final, or Chitrahar, or Rajani, or whatever else you had been watching. But there was nothing you could do if a big leader died. Days of national mourning followed during which DD shut shop and went home, or opened it only to drown you in sorrow with gloomy shastriya sangeet.

Not that DD was exciting otherwise. Children nodded off in the middle of the evening news. Grown-ups stayed up in the hope of catching an episode of Buniyaad, or Jeremy Brett in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or Satyajit Ray Presents, or Lucy, or whatever came afterwards. It was not unusual for DD to repeat episodes, but viewers watched them anyway out of habit.

Children had only Sunday mornings to look forward to (Johnny Soko and his Flying Robot was a rare evening show). Mickey Mouse, Spiderman, He Man, Street Hawk, Appu aur Pappu, Knight Rider and a few others walked the 80s’ generation to maturity. But Ramayan, Mahabharat, Chanakya, Bharat Ek Khoj and other shows had started encroaching on their time. The children twitched impatiently as Ramayan’s arrows took longer than intercontinental missiles to collide. When cable came, they happily jumped ship to sing, “I want my MTV.”

Radio with images

Still, DD in the early-90s was a much-improved avatar of its original. From the beginning, television in India had been intended to educate, not entertain. It started when All India Radio (AIR) approached the United States Information Service (USIS) in 1958 for help to start television services. USIS loaned AIR some cameras and other equipment, and Unesco gave 20 TV sets and portable generators to set up tele-clubs in Delhi.

And so, with a puny, 500-watt Philips transmitter, Delhi got India’s first TV service on September 15, 1959. For some years, there were just two shows of one hour each over the week. And they were only available in a radius of 24km. Parts of Ghaziabad and Gurgaon districts had no signals till July 1971, when a more powerful transmitter increased the range to 60km.

Nobody missed the signals, though. Even in 1973, Delhi had only 75,000 TV sets. Entire India bought 97,000 sets in 1975. The government kept a count because, back then, you needed a licence to own a TV or even a radio, for that matter. The annual licence fee was Rs 30. So, you had to be rich to have your private telly. In 1974, a 19-inch B/W TV cost about Rs 2,100 in India, while in the US it was worth $150, or Rs 1,200 at the prevailing exchange rate of roughly Rs 8 to a dollar.

While Delhi experimented with television as an educational tool through the 1960s, other metros didn’t get their stations until the early 1970s. Mumbai station was commissioned on October 2, 1972.

The main Delhi experiment in those years was called ‘Delhi School Television Project’. It started in 1960, and by 1964-65, 62% of the city’s 367 higher secondary schools had a TV set to show students 20-minute lessons.

‘Agricultural Television Pilot Project’ was the next big thing. On January 26, 1967, it started Krishi Darshan, the longest running show on Indian TV. But the audience for it shrank rapidly. A survey found the main reason farmers didn’t watch it was because they came home tired after working in the field and weren’t in a mood for ‘education’ about crops. The show had no entertainment component.

When AIR started daily telecasts from August 1, 1965, it wedged in some entertainment in its schedule. West Germany had helped Delhi build a modern studio. Once a month, it showed a feature film edited to fit a 90-minute slot. Then came Chitrahar, a Bollywood music show, but the guiding principle for both the movie and the songs was “suitability for viewing in a family setting.” Content for TV had to be “free from sex, nudity, violence and crime.” Each Chitrahar show was previewed by AIR’s senior programme officer and an assistant station director.

Despite the ‘sanskari’ philosophy, a 1972 survey showed Chitrahar was the favourite show in Delhi, closely followed by the Hindi news and the Hindi feature film. Krishi Darshan came last.

Doordarshan is born

Through the 1960s, the government neglected TV. Making shows was difficult because import controls kept 16mm cameras, film and processing labs scarce. A committee pointed out that studios were forced to erase old interviews and other programmes from tapes to reuse them. As a result, the BBC had more footage of Indian leaders than AIR.

It was the government’s policy then to not allow commercials on TV. An AIR director general said, “If TV is able to sell advertising time, then we will have to say goodbye to the present philosophy of TV.” But the 70s brought the realisation that Indian TV needed a new direction. More entertainment, if anything. More money too. “The newscaster should become secondary to visuals,” was a wise but ignored view of that time.

Between 1969 and 1973, the daily telecast duration had doubled from 2 hours to 4 hours, but the big change happened on April 1, 1976 when Indian radio and television were separated. The TV arm became Doordarshan (a literal translation of ‘television’) that day, with a revolving logo that looked like the rounded aperture blades of a camera lens. It was also the day Indian TV went commercial. All those memorable ads – Liril, Bajaj, Nirma, Rasna, Garden Vareli, Luna, to name a few – wouldn’t have become part of our collective memory otherwise. Of course, we could still have exchanged notes about Ek Chidiya, Anek Chidiya, and Mile Sur Mera Tumhara today.

Gradually, Indian TV became less preachy and more friendly with a little foreign help. Star Trek found an Indian following. The usually dry weekday evenings were sometimes brightened by English detectives in Target, and Shoestring. There was also the German detective show Derrick, and our own Byomkesh Bakshi. Didi’s Comedy Show, also from Germany, raised many laughs. Oshin from Japan was a lesson in grace.

There was no English pop on DD, but once a year you got to watch the Grammy highlights. Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Alannah Myles, REM – the singers who stared at you from cassette covers came alive for an hour. And sanskari DD could do nothing when Robert Palmer left parents red-faced before kids with Simply Irresistible.

In 1982, DD had switched to colour telecasts in preparation for the Asian Games, and in April 1984 the country saw its only cosmonaut, Rakesh Sharma, tell PM Indira Gandhi India looked ‘Sare Jahan Se Achha’ from space.

While DD was scoring popularity points, it needed a blockbuster, which arrived in July 1984 in the form of Hum Log. A family drama with social issues at its core and veteran actor Ashok Kumar’s thoughtful epilogues after each episode, it prodded thousands of families to buy a TV. There was an explosion of TV brands – Crown, Weston, Uptron, Nelco, Texla, Salora...down to Oscar, Onida and Binatone.

Hum Log became so popular, by one account DD received 2 lakh letters from viewers over its 18-month run, and the cast got an equal number. Other shows replicated Hum Log’s success in the decade ahead, and the Indian viewer resigned herself to a life with DD, accepting it would be mostly dull but also interesting in parts. Then cable arrived and cleared the forest of antennas.

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There’s a little bit of China, Australia and New Zealand in Gujarat’s Somnath temple

The Somnath temple in Gujarat is quite a cosmopolitan building. Its foundations have absorbed waters from the “Hoang Ho, the Yangtse and the Pearl rivers” in China, the Murray river in Australia, and the Auckland Harbour in New Zealand, among others.

This story is set in 1951, the year when the temple was reconsecrated. Several months before the installation of the lingam at the temple on May 11, 1951, the chief of the temple trustees started sending letters to India’s embassies abroad for contributions of water and twigs from all corners of the world.

Digvijaysinghji, the temple trust’s chairman, was also the Jam Saheb of Navanagar and Rajpramukh (titular head) of Saurashtra state. His quasi-official designation left Indian diplomats in a quandary. Prime Minister Nehru, a staunch secularist, repeatedly expressed his displeasure over such demands being made upon embassy officials, but he was unable to stop the flow of waters to India “from all seven oceans of the world.”

On April 17, Nehru wrote a letter to K M Munshi, the man who had been steering the temple’s reconstruction after Sardar Patel’s death.

“My dear Munshi, our ambassador in Peking writes to me that he has received a letter from the trustees of the Somnath temple asking the Embassy to collect and send waters from the Hoang Ho, the Yangtse and the Pearl rivers and also some twigs from the Tien Shan mountains. It was stated that this was necessary for the reconsecration of the Somnath temple…”

The Mercury, published from Hobart, reported on March 7, 1951:

“A request from India for 12 ounces of water from the Southern Ocean at Hobart Town has been received by the Tasmanian branch president of the United Nations Association (Mr J B Piggott). The water — sealed in a special container — was airmailed from Hobart yesterday.

Well, that’s how much 12 ounces is: 

“Other things needed for the ceremony are: 12 oz of water from the Murray river, 1/4 pound of a few twigs of any species of vegetation from the Australian Alps, and 1/4 pound of soil from Canberra,” The Mercury said.


From New Zealand came “water from Auckland Harbour, twigs from the Southern Alps, and soil from Wellington… for this ceremony water, flora and soil were required not only from the sacred places in India, but also water from the seven traditional oceans of the world, and soil and flora from distant lands.”

A week after the ceremony, The Chronicle of Adelaide reported that more than 100,000 pilgrims from all over India had come to see it. “Astrologers marked out 9.47am on May 11, 1951, as the most auspicious time in the calendar for the ceremony… At that precise moment a linga or column of black marble was lowered through the roof into the centre of the inner sanctum round which the new temple is being built.” It must have been quite a spectacle.

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Peas and rhythms: How India lost its population battle in the 1950s

Back in my school days the social studies textbooks said India’s population was 700 million. Thirty years later, it has doubled and we are worried. But worrying about population growth is an old Indian ritual by now. On December 20, 1956, India’s then health minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur said this in Parliament:

“The increase of population in India constitutes a big national problem.”

The country’s population at the time was a third of what it is now, but growing fast. In 1951, we were a country of 361 million. In just a decade, we increased by 21% to 439 million. With that population and today’s GDP we could have been reasonably well-off. But if our leadership was alert to the population explosion all those years ago, how did we continue multiplying for the next 60 years?

Neither urgency nor direction

Did government of India not try hard enough to check population growth, or did it stray in the wrong direction? Both. India’s ‘family planning’ or birth-control effort started soon after Independence, but it lacked urgency and direction.

“While government are not unaware of the problem, it is not possible for them to initiate any countrywide scheme of control on a matter like this without a very careful study of all factors involved,” Kaur had told Parliament on July 29, 1952.

It was a reasonable approach, but was the government really making “a very careful study”? All it had done until then was set up three experimental centres for pilot studies on a birth-control measure that both scientists and planners did not find feasible. Steamrolling all opposition, the government wasted several years on this measure.

The rhythm folly

The government’s pet birth control measure was called ‘rhythm method’. Instead of contraceptives it required knowledge of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Couples who took the course were advised to have intercourse on days when ovulation was least likely to occur.

Even in 1952 doctors spoke against the method. Kaur admitted: “Some of the women’s organisations have given their opinion. They are in favour of the use of mechanical contraceptives.”

The pill was not available then but condoms and foam tablets were. Did the government try to popularize these? Asked whether the government intended to subsidise contraceptives for the poor, on September 13, 1954, Kaur replied: “No, government is not supplying contraceptives to anybody.”

What about grants to institutions and experts for research in family planning? The government did not distribute any funds to them. Its focus was on the complicated rhythm method that required careful training.

There were only three centres  –  two in New Delhi and one in Ramanagaram, Mysore  –  to train married couples in the method, and here’s the government’s own statement about Ramanagaram from August 24, 1953.

The centre covered 14 villages with a total population of 8,000. Training was reserved for couples among whom the wife was aged under 40 years. The area had 941 such couples, and 712 signed up.

The programme started in September-October 1952, but “by the end of June 1953, only 385 menstruating women had been actively followed for various lengths of time. Tentative advice on the rhythm method is given after the examination of three menstrual cycles. Final rhythm is worked out on the basis of six menstrual cycles.”

How was such a slow and complicated scheme expected to cover entire India?

To know their safe dates couples had to use aids like beads and calendar cards, and many were not happy using them. Women also did not like the invasion of their privacy for drawing up rhythm charts.

Headstrong course

The government ignored all advice. These are some questions and answers from the September 13, 1954 debate in Parliament:

Mrs Violet Alva: “Dr V K R Rao, who was the delegate at the Population Control Conference, had stated that the rhythm method was not acceptable to the countryside and that some other method had to be thought of…”

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: “Many people say many things. The government should consider them all and see what is feasible for the country.”

Dr Mrs Seeta Parmanand: “What is the percentage of people, both doctors and social workers, who are in favour of the rhythm method?”

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: “Government has no information as to what proportion favours which method.”

Dr D H Variava: “May I know if there are any statistics about lowering of births after the adoption of this family planning for about 2 or 3 years?”

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: “No statistics can be arrived at after one year.”

Peas, not pills

Instead of pushing straightforward birth control measures, the government also wasted time and money on ideas like developing oral contraceptives from field peas.

In 1955–56 one Mumbai-based scientist, Dr Khanolkar, carried out research on the subject, and later work was continued by two doctors at All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health. Tests on animals showed that pea extract caused abortions when taken in very high doses, but it did not find use as a human contraceptive.

Government also released a movie, ‘Planned Parenthood’, in English and six other languages, and started a free magazine, ‘Family Planning News’, with a circulation of 10,000 copies, but neither campaign had an impact.

End of rhythm

For six years, the government stubbornly shrugged off criticism of the rhythm method and then just as it had sprung the scheme on India, it gave it a quiet burial.

On September 16, 1958, Dr Mrs Seeta Parmanand asked this question in Parliament: “Whether the experiment on rhythmic method of family planning has been stopped?”

The new health minister, D P Karmakar, replied: “Experiments exclusively on rhythmic method have been stopped.”

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BVO: Modern India’s first big food scare

In 2016, bread briefly became a dubious food article in India after reports said it contains potassium bromate, but it was not the first time a bromine food additive had become controversial in the country. In the late 1980s, when we were a far less health-conscious nation, a food additive called BVO (brominated vegetable oil) made newspaper headlines, and figured in parliamentary debates and school tiffin talk alike.

BVO was an emulsifier/stabiliser used in orange- and lemon-flavoured sodas like Gold Spot and Limca those days. An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that normally do not mix with each other. For instance, fat floats on water, but milk is a stable blend of the two. Added to soft drinks, BVO kept the water and flavouring substances in Limca, for instance, from separating.

But there were doubts about BVO’s safety. Some researchers said it could cause cancer, others linked it to memory loss, and skin and nerve disorders. The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization had recommended long-term studies on the chemical to establish its adverse effects.

In 1988, the developed world was divided over BVO’s safety. The US, Canada and Australia allowed its use while West Germany (the Wall was still standing), Japan and the UK had banned it. The irrepressible Subramanian Swamy raised a question about BVO in the parliament on August 8, 1989: “Whether government are aware that citrus-flavoured aerated cold drinks contain carcinogenic brominated vegetable oil?”

India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had already removed BVO from the list of permitted food emulsifiers and stabilisers on April 15, 1988, but as the industry was not ready for the change it was decided to defer the ban by two years.

So April 15, 1990 was the last day when BVO was legally added to soft drinks in India. Of course, its use did not stop immediately. When officers from the Delhi administration’s Department of Prevention of Food Adulteration raided four bottling factories on April 17, 19 and 30, they found BVO in two samples of Gold Spot (the zing thing) and (lime ’n’ lemony) Limca  —  both brands owned by Parle (Exports) Private Limited. The foul samples were found at Delhi Bottling Co on Shivaji Marg and Pearl Drinks, Lawrence Road, in the capital.

Parle denied it was still using BVO, and published newspaper advertisements claiming Limca and Gold Spot were clean. The matter reached Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission. On May 22, 1990, MRTPC told Parle to stop using BVO and ordered an investigation into the conduct of soft drink makers.

A headline in the July 7, 1990 edition of The Hindustan Times announced the verdict: “Limca ad false, says MRTPC”. A day earlier, MRTPC had ordered Parle to stop the false and misleading advertisements. Still, Limca ads continued on the national broadcaster Doordarshan.

Asked about it, the government came up with a typically hogwash reply: MRTPC had not issued any instructions to Doordarshan and “advertisements of soft drinks, including Limca, are being telecast on Doordarshan only after obtaining a written undertaking supported with documentary proof from the clients that these do not contain BVO.”

Parle’s rival firm Campa Beverages/Pure Drinks escaped flak after the ban as MRTPC observed: “the products of the respondents do not contain any BVO.”


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Why India was a 3-car country for 30 years

Maruti 800 was to India what Model T had been to America in the early 1900s, and the Fiat 500 to Europe in the post-War years. It was at the right place at the right time and the right price.

Before the 800 arrived, for 30 years India had only three cars: Hindustan Ambassador, Premier Padmini and Standard Herald. Was it love? What explains the Indian people’s surprising constancy to these cars?

Government policy. Those cars were not the best fit for India, not in the 1980s, nor in 1950s. Fans vouch for the sturdiness of their frames and the forgiving nature of their engines, but any other car from the 1950s would have done just as well.

Point is, why did India start with these three mid-size cars instead of something smaller like the 500 or the Mini that would have been cheaper and got Indian car manufacturing to shift into high gear 30 years early?

Case for ‘Baby’ Cars

The government was not blind to the need for smaller and cheaper cars. Many members of Parliament had pointed out that the existing cars, priced around Rs 10,000 each in 1957, were too expensive for the middle class, and new models in the Rs 5,000–6,000 range were needed.

This is what then industries minister Manubhai Shah had to say about ‘baby’ cars on November 20, 1957: “That can be a real average middle-class family car, particularly for urban use…Undoubtedly the lighter cars are wanted in the interest of the consumer public, particularly the middle-class families in the urban areas.”

Policy Block

But the smaller people-movers did not materialise until Suzuki set up shop in India 30 years later. For a brief period, Hindustan Motors sold a smaller car called Baby Hindustan  — “already licensed as far as the manufacturing programme is concerned, but we have not encouraged its large-scale manufacture.”

Why didn’t the government encourage smaller cars? The answer lies in independent India’s well-intentioned but counterproductive early manufacturing policies.

Back in 1953, an advisory body called Tariff Commission recommended that “the manufacture of automobiles should be restricted to a few firms.” The motive was to transform India into a manufacturing country. If only a few car models were allowed, each one of them would sell in larger numbers, bringing economies of scale to encourage local manufacturing.

In fact, before Independence in 1947 and for the first few years afterwards, about three dozen models of cars and altogether 4-5 dozen models of automobiles were sold in India.

The government responded to the 1953 recommendations by allowing only six firms to manufacture selected types of vehicles, including cars, trucks and jeeps. How were these six firms picked? The government called for manufacturing programmes from industrialists, and from those who applied, it approved six.

Before full manufacturing could begin, the government imposed restrictions on the assemblers to import only three types of cars and trucks. Three years later, in 1956, the Commission came back with even stronger advice:

“We should give priority to the manufacture of commercial vehicles rather than passenger cars.”

“It would be definitely undesirable to introduce any more passenger cars for manufacture in the country.”

The Economic Weekly of March 2, 1957 criticised this approach because no thought was given to the type of car India needed most: “The Tariff Commission has had to accept the situation as it was and give its approval to the manufacture of cars for which sponsors were already available. A selection on the basis of first-come, first-served, without looking into the capacity of these cars to suit Indian conditions.”

Dogmatic Attitude

The government went along with the Commission’s advice.

“The government has decided that as far as passenger cars are concerned, the manufacturing units should concentrate on Hindustan Landmaster (later Hindustan Ambassador), Fiat 1100 and Standard Vanguard. Also Standard 10, which is of a lighter variety than the above three models, is being manufactured in sizeable numbers. Until and unless these models go into production in sufficient numbers and also with the requisite percentage of indigenous components to a satisfactory limit, it is the policy of the government not to permit any further models in the passenger cars,” Manubhai Shah said while moving the Indian Tariff (Amendment) Bill, 1957.

Mark the word ‘satisfactory’. Whose satisfaction?

“…in the opinion of the government to produce to the entire satisfaction of the government,” said Shah.

He dismissed the question of promoting compact cars: “We have not encouraged its (Baby Hindustan’s) large-scale manufacture and we would not encourage its large-scale manufacture unless and until the Hindustan Ambassador comes out in a satisfactory way in all respects.”

The government clung to that policy. “We would rather concentrate on the existing models.” Years passed, governments changed but for three decades, India continued to focus on those three initial car models.

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