It’s been 109 years of electricity in Shimla!

 

Chaba power plant overlooks the Sutlej near Tattapani/ May 2004

July 15 is an important date in the history of Shimla. It was on this day, in 1913, that the city got municipal electricity. The Viceregal Lodge and important installations like the waterworks had their ‘dynamos’ for years, but on July 15, 1913, electricity became a convenience that the common resident of the British summer capital in India could apply for and get.

Shimla could plug in because a little powerhouse at a place called Chaba, down in the valley of the Sutlej, came on stream. It was the first hydel plant in the region, built over four years. With just three 250kW Siemens generators at the time, it produced electricity that might not suffice for the needs of a few AC-running housing blocks these days, but a century ago 750kW was so much power that engineers were rushing to their drawing boards thinking up trams and electric cars, and other uses for it.

In time, two bigger generators of 500kW each were added, and Chaba became a 1.75MW installation. All five of those original units still roar dutifully every day, evidence of their sturdy construction and the engineering skills of Captain B C Battye’s team that built the power house.

I have visited this little gem in the hills thrice, and each time I have come away feeling happy because not only does the machinery recall an older, unhurried world, but also the people who keep it going show a degree of attachment to it that you do not associate with ‘sarkari’ jobs. They are proud of it, house-proud, in fact, the way you would be of a colonial inheritance up in Shimla city.

First visit: September 2000

I was a rookie reporter with a new bike. Early one morning I rode to Tattapani from Chandigarh (160km), knowing only that the place had hot water springs. What I did not know was that it had been ravaged in a flood a month earlier. On the night intervening July 31 and August 1, the Sutlej had risen in a cataclysmic flood that’s expected to occur only once in 61,000 years. The news did not get the space it deserved.

For a few hours, the river’s level increased by 60 feet over the normal – the height of a six-storey building. The torrent washed away 20 bridges on a 200km stretch and killed 135 people and 1,673 cattle. Property worth Rs 1,500 crore was destroyed. Tattapani, which at around 650m is almost the last point in the river’s steep mountainous course, was lucky because the flood waters reached it early morning and the villagers were able to scurry up the hill banks. But the village itself was a mess. The receding waters left rooms packed with silt up to the window sills.

A month later, people were still carting away the sand. The school ground and every single street were still under a grey, gritty blanket. My five-hour ride seemed wasted until, on the way back, I spotted the sign for Chaba. I rode there expecting to be turned away as you would be from any other dam or power installation in this country, but what I got was a surprised and warm welcome.

The powerhouse had also silted up in the flood and had to be closed, but the workmen had got it going again within weeks. That afternoon they were cleaning up and repairing the yard and their officer gave me a quick tour with permission to shoot at will. I stayed only about an hour because home was far away, but it remains one of my dearest travel memories.

Second visit: May 2004

In May 2004, I went on a tour of Himachal Pradesh’s Mandi district in my little Maruti 800. I chose to return by the Shimla road to revisit Tattapani and Chaba. On reaching Tattapani, I was surprised to find an arched concrete bridge being built over the river. Until then, there had only been a shaky suspension bridge of some antiquity over which vehicles passed one at a time.

The staff at Chaba was just as friendly. It was late afternoon and nearing time for all of the power plant’s five generators to come to life. Although it stands beside the Sutlej, the Chaba plant runs on water from a stream called Nauti Khad, and under full load (1.75 MW) the water in its reservoir lasts for only three hours and 20 minutes. So, through the day, only one small unit is run, while in the evening all five are turned on.

They turned on one of the big ones just to let me get a shot for the magazine I then wrote for. I walked around and found an old Chubb brass lock on a door, a ceiling fan with wooden blades inside an office, and a concrete bomb shelter built in 1942 that was being used as a store. The whole place was a living museum.

Last visit: June 2016

I passed twice through Tattapani in the monsoon of 2006 but couldn’t visit Chaba. The new bridge was ready and the old one had burnt down within a week of its opening, locals said. Its skeleton still hung over the fearsome gorge. But when I returned in 2016, not a trace of the old bridge remained. The turbulent Sutlej had become a vast lake because of Kol Dam that had come up downstream. It wasn’t what I had brought my wife and son to see. We turned back without stopping and went to Chaba.

The 4km link road to the hydel plant was busier, there were many new buildings and we drove past the plant without seeing it. Coming back, I found it a quieter place, desolate almost. Had it been shut down? We squeezed past the locked gate and found 3-4 staffers, and the same smiling welcome, and the same Chubb lock and the same Siemens generators. Everything working fine. Truly timeless.

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Why India had 10-year waiting lists for scooters in the 1970s

 

India is a major scooter and motorcycle exporter today. During April-September last year it shipped 22.5 lakh two-wheelers abroad. But back in the 1970s it didn’t make enough of these vehicles for its own use.

At the start of the 1970s the waiting period for a scooter in India was 7 years. With 2.6 lakh pending bookings and annual production of just 48,392 scooters in 1970, this wasn’t surprising.

If you booked a scooter before your wedding, you had school-going kids by the time your scooter arrived. And things got worse before they got better – by the end of the decade the waiting period had increased to 10 years.

Test Of Patience

Buying a scooter in the 1970s was a test of patience. It started with you writing an application to the dealer. Then you went to a post office, opened a savings account and made a security deposit of Rs 250. The post office gave you a passbook, which you submitted to the scooter dealer as proof of intent to purchase.

And then the long wait started. When your turn came after 7, 8 or 10 years, the dealer returned the passbook and “authorised” you to withdraw your Rs 250 to make the full payment. To check blackmarketing, you weren’t allowed to sell your new scooter in the first year of purchase without the state transport commissioner’s permission.

This procedure had been laid down in a 10-year-old rule called ‘Scooters (Distribution and Sale) Control Order, 1960.’

Shifting Goalposts

The scooter shortage had been building up over the years, and the only way out of it was to increase production, but the government’s policies and attitude made it difficult. 

Those days, any project that needed an investment of more than Rs 10 lakh in foreign exchange had to be cleared by the ministry for Industrial Development, Internal Trade and Company Affairs. In 1965–66, many industrialists had applied for permission to set up scooter factories in India, but the ministry sat on their applications.

Eventually, all of those private proposals were scrapped and the government came up with a new rule allowing private companies to make scooters only if they did so “without foreign technical know-how and without foreign assistance.” 

How was somebody with zero experience of automobile manufacturing to make a scooter without a technology tie-up? This rule was unfair also because Automobile Products of India (API) and Bajaj Auto had been making Lambretta and Vespa scooters, respectively, with foreign know-how, for years. And their components were still not fully localised. But the government said their licences were up for renewal in less than a year, after which they would be expected to make every part in India.

Despite this near-impossible condition of indigenous design and production, private businesses responded enthusiastically. By February 1970, there were 31 proposals before the government, but once again it sat on them. In May that year, then industries minister (later President of India) Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed said, “Within six months some decision will be taken.”

Scooters India Fiasco

But the decision that followed surprised everybody. The government announced it would set up its own scooter company “with indigenous know-how”. On May 11, 1970, Ahmed said in Parliament: “Jo public sector mein karkhana lagaya jayega, vah bhi yahin ke maal ke upar lagaya jayega jo ki hamare mulk mein banaya ja raha hai (all equipment used in the government scooter factory will be fully indigenous).”

For two years the government did nothing, and then, proving the absurdity of its own policy, it went and bought Italian scooter-maker Innocenti’s factory in Milan for $1.85 million (Rs 1.5 crore in those days at an exchange rate of about Rs 8 to a US dollar). It bought the “entire plant along with all auxiliaries as well as the technical know-how, including worldwide trademark and export rights… of M/s Innocenti, owners of the Lambretta brand”.

The government admitted that bringing a scooter to market from the drawing-board stage would have taken 7-8 years, so an outright purchase was the wiser option. It promised to make 1 lakh scooters every year to shorten the waiting lists. But that was wishful thinking as the first scooter from the government-owned company – Scooters India Limited – was not expected to roll out for at least two years.

Besides, in correcting one mistake the government had made another. It had sunk its money in a scooter that had lost the race to Vespa globally and was a distant second choice in India. As against 84,883 pending Lambretta bookings on March 31, 1970, there were 176,933 bookings for Vespa scooters. So Scooters India Limited never ran to capacity even in those shortage years. Instead, it ran up huge losses before it went bust. 

Queues Grew Longer

Meanwhile, the waiting period for a scooter went on increasing. A study group of the government’s Planning Commission estimated that 2.1 lakh scooters would be needed in 1973–74. The think tank National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) said annual demand would increase to 243,000 scooters within eight years, by 1979–80. But yearly scooter production in 1971 was less than 70,000 units.

Once again, government policies were holding back production. API and Bajaj were allowed to make only 50,000 scooters each. When they  applied for permission to increase production capacity to 100,000 units each per annum, the government started reviewing their applications under the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act.

As for the new companies that wanted to get into scooter manufacturing, the government told them it would grant licences based on “what price they are going to charge the consumer and whether they can efficiently manufacture the scooter or not”.

But the new licensees would also have faced the production cap of 50,000 scooters per annum, making it difficult for them to compete with API and Bajaj on price. So, the new suitors dispersed, Scooters India Limited disappointed, and the waiting period for a scooter in India gradually increased to 10 years.

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When Chandigarh was a fort, and Sukhna a river

Chandigarh is a city without a sense of local history. Founded by fiat, designed by a foreign hand and built on a greenfield site, it was born without an umbilical cord. Its first-generation residents came from outside and felt the rootlessness acutely. Their children also grew up in the dark because the school curriculum developed in Delhi didn’t touch upon Chandigarh’s history.

So, the belief that Chandigarh is a city without a history persists, but is it true? What was Chandigarh like before it became City Beautiful? Was it a jungle, or did people live there? What was their daily life like?

Some answers to these questions may be found in the tour reports of British officers. One of them, Dr Bateson, visited the area 154 years ago. He was the civil surgeon of Ambala, and was sent to investigate the reasons for the high rates of goitre and spleen (caused by malaria) in the region.

One of the interesting points in his report – submitted on March 28, 1868 – is that the name ‘Chandigarh’ existed even then, although it was not the name of a city or a village but of a fort on top of a hill.

Back then, the area was called Ilaqa Mani Majra. If you are not familiar with Chandigarh, Mani Majra is an old town that’s part of the Union Territory of Chandigarh now. In Bateson’s time it was the only town there, and it was surrounded by 69 villages.

When Bateson visited Mani Majra town it was already more than a century old and had 2,325 houses with 6,045 inhabitants.

The Gazetteer of Ambala district from 1884 says Mani Majra was part of the Sirhind province of Punjab under the Mughals. When the Mughal governor Zain Khan died in 1762, a Sikh leader named Garib Das seized 84 villages around Mani Majra, and made the town his capital.

The new ruler of Mani Majra got the title of ‘raja’ from the Afghan invader Ahmed Shah Abdali. Later, the British confirmed it when his successors helped them in their war against the Gurkhas.

The popular temple of Mansa Devi outside Chandigarh was also built by Mani Majra’s kings, and twice a year it used to draw about 80,000 pilgrims to fairs held in March and September. They were quite large gatherings for that era.

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Just as Delhi grew up along the Yamuna, Ilaqa Mani Majra was dependent on water from the Ghaggar, which used to be a perennial river.

Most of the land was low-lying so the river water could be easily channeled to the villages for irrigation. But though they depended on the Ghaggar, the locals believed its water was harmful. The British settlement report of the area from 1859 says, “The villages are frightfully under-populated for the reason that the irrigation is most pernicious to health.”

It also noted that fever and goitre were extremely prevalent. The medical condition of cretinism, in which thyroid deficiency causes physical deformity and mental weakness, was common too. It was not unusual for a village to have four, five or even six cretins.

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Bateson began his tour of Ilaqa Mani Majra in Mauli village, about 3km south of the town, on March 22, 1868. He found that 17 men and 6 women in Mauli had goitre. The rate was higher among men because they were all locals. They had grown up in Mauli, unlike their wives who had come from outside. So, it’s not surprising that people connected the high rate of goitre with local conditions, chiefly the water from the Ghaggar.

Next morning, Bateson travelled to a large village named Pabhat (pronounced Pubhaat) about 8km south of Mani Majra. It lay across another river called Sukhna and had 357 houses with 1,630 residents.

Yes, Sukhna is only known as a lake now, but back in Bateson’s time it was a small river that started near Pinjore and joined the Ghaggar at Mubarakpur after a journey of about 25km. It was easy to cross and even in the rains it had only about 3 feet of water. Unlike the Ghaggar, the Sukhna had little water in March. Bateson says it was broad and nearly dry.

If Mowli was a sick village, in Pabhat the “inhabitants looked remarkably fine-looking and healthy”. It had only two goitre patients, and both had come from outside.

Bateson found out that Pabhat had 11 wells, and the locals drank water from them. They irrigated their fields with water from the Sukhna, and believed they were healthy because they stayed away from the Ghaggar.

It’s interesting that opium was one of the chief crops of Pabhat.

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Bateson mentions several other villages in his report that he covered within a few days. Remember this was the 1860s and he was doing all his travelling on horseback and on foot.

In sharp contrast to Pabhat, Abheypur village, which was entirely dependent on the Ghaggar, had 11 goitre patients among its 393 residents. The patwari of Abheypur told Bateson that some years earlier there had been 20 goitre patients in the village.

Chandigarh’s Sector 8 was once called Kalibar village. It was far from any stream and completely rain-dependent. And Bateson found it had neither goitre nor spleen. But in Barra Firozpur, about 5km away from Mani Majra, everyone drank from the Ghaggar and there were 14 cases of goitre. Bateson records: “Children died young. Some of them grew up deaf and dumb and daft.”

On the 24th of March, Bateson came to Mani Majra town, and found that 6% of its population had goitre. He doesn’t give the exact number, but there would have been about 360 cases in a population of 6,000. Even the dogs in Mani Majra’s streets had goitre!

The locals again blamed the Ghaggar for the disease and Bateson says whenever they detected symptoms of goitre arising, they tried to shift to a relative’s town or village “out of the influence of the Ghaggar” for a few months till the “incipient goitre recedes”.

Back in the 1980s, Mani Majra had Chandigarh’s swankiest cinema hall called Dhillon, which later became its first multiplex. It also had a large automobile repair market, but in Bateson’s time the Ilaqa was famous for its rice.

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What about Chandigarh, perhaps you are wondering. Bateson visited a village called Chandi on March 25, 1868. He describes its precise location: “I am just below the old fort and close to the grand trunk road from Ambala to Kalka – the seventh milestone from the latter place being right opposite me.”

So, Chandi was exactly 7 miles or about 11km before Kalka. And it was completely dependent for water on the Ghaggar. However, the fort on the hill above it, which was called Chandigarh, used water from a rain-fed tank and was free from goitre.

Bateson also visited a village called Dara near Chandi where water was so scarce 3 months in a year that its residents drank milk instead. None of them had goitre.

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So, Bateson returned convinced that the Ghaggar was the root cause of goitre in Ilaqa Mani Majra but his superiors were not so certain. They said chemical testing had found the Ghaggar to have very good water.

The problem seemed to be that the villagers were drinking contaminated water from irrigation ditches. The British administration concluded that the “composition of the subsoil had entirely changed the character of the Ghaggar water.”

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There’s more to Chandigarh’s past than goitre, malaria and a “pernicious” river, but the point of this story is that even if the city is young, it is not bereft of history.

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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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