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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How India's dream to make petrol from coal died

For decades, different committees proposed this path to energy self-sufficiency, but governments disagreed

When petrol crossed the Rs 100 mark on February 17, Prime Minister Narendra Modi blamed previous governments for India’s dependence on imported oil. He might have a point. Around the time India became independent, the technology to turn coal into liquid fuel was in the news. Government of India showed interest in it. Foreign companies made pitches. Indian scientists made a plan. Then, nothing.

This happened several times over the decades, and it’s only in recent years that talk of turning coal into petrol has died out. This is a story of shortsightedness and official lethargy bound in red tape.

Hitler’s oil

Coal fed the steam age, but the 20th century belonged to internal combustion engines that ran on petrol and diesel. Ironically, Germany, whose inventors made the first petrol and diesel engines, had no oil of its own. It had plenty of coal, though.

In 1935, German engineers showed that converting coal into petrol and diesel was commercially “feasible”. Although costlier than imported fuel, it could save the country in a crisis. By the time WW-II started in 1939, Germany had built nine plants based on the Fischer-Tropsch conversion process with a total annual capacity of 740,000 metric tonnes of synthetic oil. In 1944, German synthetic oil capacity peaked at 4 million tonnes per annum. It was this capacity to make oil that kept Hitler’s tanks, trucks and planes moving even after the Allies had cut off his other oil supplies.

Indian interest

The war ended in 1945 with Hitler’s defeat but the interest in synthetic oil did not die. The December 31, 1947 edition of The New York Times reported that a big American chemical company called Koppers planned to “devote a considerable amount of research during 1948 to development of processes for making synthetic liquid fuels and other chemicals from coal.”

In time, Koppers and other companies pitched the technology to India. In July 1952, science minister KD Malaviya confirmed in the Lok Sabha that the director general of industries had made plans for a synthetic oil plant as early as 1950 and negotiated with a foreign firm to set it up.

The government’s own Fuel Research Institute in Dhanbad had set up an experimental Fischer-Tropsch unit “producing about one gallon of liquid product per day” and a “small high pressure hydrogenation plant for production of aviation spirit.” But Malaviya said the plan had been abandoned because of “cost.”

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru elaborated on the cost aspect in December 1953: “This particular matter of synthetic petrol has been examined very thoroughly. In fact, it was not merely examined, but schemes were worked out, but due to various reasons, one of them being the heavy cost of this project – it is a very, very expensive project – it could not be undertaken. I cannot say that it has been given up, but for the present it is not being undertaken.”

Yet, two years later, in March 1955, Malaviya said Koppers had submitted a report to the government “two years ago”, indicating interest in synthetic oil had revived soon after his 1952 reply. He said, “steps are being taken to obtain project reports” from reputed international firms for setting up a synthetic oil plant. The government was looking to use lignite from southern mines for making oil.

South Africa

While India dillied and dallied on synthetic oil, South Africa went right ahead and turned it into a major industry in 1955. A 1980 report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says Sasol (South African Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation) had been running the “world’s only oil-from-coal plant... since 1955,” and after expansion it would produce 112,000 barrels of oil per day – “about half of South Africa’s needs.”

While India rejected synthetic oil in the 1950s on grounds of cost, the EPA report says Sasol’s production cost in 1979 averaged $17 per barrel, well below the $20 that imported oil cost at the time. And, South Africans paid “about $0.63/litre of gasoline at the pump.” The low price was thanks to cheap labour in South Africa. The EPA estimated that synthetic oil in the US would cost at least $27 per barrel, and the price could go up to $45. But India had no dearth of cheap labour then, so perhaps our doubts about viability were misplaced.

Sasol is still very much in the business of synthetic oil, and a 2017 Financial Times report says “its Secunda plant east of Johannesburg is the world’s largest coal-to-liquids facility.”

More experiments

But the question of synthetic oil was still alive in India. Many MPs pushed for it on grounds of energy security. The government-appointed Ghosh committee submitted its report on synthetic oil in February 1956. It recommended starting with a Rs 20 crore plant in the Jambad Kajora area of West Bengal’s Raniganj coalfield that would yield 120,000-125,000 tonnes of motor fuel from 1.2 million tonnes of non-coking coal. The report was rejected because “natural oil was cheaper and foreign exchange was scarce.”

Yet, experiments continued. In September 1960, science minister Humayun Kabir told Lok Sabha about IIT Kharagpur’s pilot project to make synthetic fuel from coal. Over 20 days, the small unit with a designed capacity of 100 gallons per day made 64 gallons per day. The Central Fuel Research Institute (CFRI) in Hyderabad was also engaged in similar research, Kabir said.

Nine years went by, and in December 1969 education minister VKRV Rao said experiments conducted at CFRI “showed encouraging results for conversion of Neyveli lignite to oil by direct hydrogenation or by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Further work is in progress.”

Six years on, rattled by the steep rise in oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israel war, another committee was studying the subject. Deputy energy minister Siddheshwar Prasad told Lok Sabha in March 1975: “The matter of conversion of coal into synthetic oil is under consideration of the ‘Expert Group on Synthetic Oil’ recently constituted by the central government.”

The committee gave its report in 1977, recommending a synthetic oil plant with a capacity of 1 million tonnes per annum. The plant was expected to cost Rs 1,140 crore, so the government rejected it citing low international prices. The government’s argument: synthetic oil would cost Rs 809 per tonne without duties, and Rs 997 with duties and taxes, but imported crude cost only Rs 909 per tonne (1977 price). Couldn’t the government have exempted synthetic fuel from taxes, to start the industry?

US attempt

Koppers and synthetic fuel were back in the news in 1980. The US wanted to insulate its oil supply from Arab-Israel conflict and it decided to set up an independent agency called ‘Synthetic Fuels Corporation’ for this. Fletcher L Byrom, chairman of Koppers at the time, was a frontrunner to head the corporation. The NYT on July 23, 1980 reported that the SFC would “dwarf the programs that took America to the moon and built the interstate highway system.”

The SFC’s task was to spur the production of oil from coal, shale and tar sands, so that within two years, 10% of the US oil consumption would come from these sources. Over the next few years, it spent almost a billion dollars on four synthetic fuel projects, none of which survive today. The SFC itself was wound up in 1986 because President Reagan chose to leave the matter of oil supply to market forces.

More committees

Meanwhile, India appointed another committee – the Sidhu Committee – to examine the question of synthetic oil. In February 1986, energy minister Vasant Sathe told Lok Sabha that the cost of setting up a 1 million tonne synthetic oil plant had risen to Rs 2,800 crore. “Resource constraints and adverse economics” prevailed again – no synthetic oil plant was set up.

After that, as India liberalised, synthetic oil and self-reliance ceased to matter. The next mention of synthetic oil in Lok Sabha occured 20 years ago in February 2001. And it was a passing mention: “the issue of production of synthetic oil from coal can be transferred to one or other of the fuel research agencies.”

In October 2008, Rajya Sabha member B K Hariprasad asked “whether private players have evinced interest in setting up such coal-to-liquid projects”. The government replied, “28 applications were received from 22 applicants,” who had proposed to get know-how from foreign firms.

At last, India seemed to be on the verge of unlocking its synthetic oil potential, but five years passed with no action on the ground, and in March 2013 BJP member Piyush Goyal asked, “whether the central government has any proposal to extract oil from coal”. The government replied coal liquefaction was “one of the specified end uses for the purpose of allotment of captive coal/lignite blocks to the entrepreneurs.”

Jindal Steel and Power was one of the companies that had proposed to build a synthetic oil plant in India. But when the Supreme Court cancelled the allocation of 214 coalfields to private players in September 2014, Jindal aborted its $10-billion, 80,000 barrels-per-day coal-to-diesel project in Odisha.

Meanwhile, 85 years after Germany and 65 years after South Africa, India’s science establishment still talks about synthetic oil as though it is a technology of the future. A 2017 blog post on the mygov.in website says: “Very recently, CSIR-CIMFR has successfully installed and commissioned an integrated coal-to-liquid pilot plant… (which) produces 5 litres per day liquid hydrocarbon.”

IIT Kharagpur was making 64 gallons per day in 1960!

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