Is sodium about to dethrone lithium in the battery universe?

A battery multiverse is more likely. Lithium will rule applications where price is not a barrier, and sodium those where battery weight does not matter

Whether it’s an ordinary power plug or the charger of your phone, they bear the letter ‘V’ for volt – the electricity unit named after the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta. Volta made the first electric battery in the year 1800. He probably didn’t imagine a future when the world would be powered by batteries, but here we are two centuries later.

With the Earth getting hotter, time is running out for coal and other fossil fuels. We will be using more and more renewables like the Sun and the wind to power our homes, offices, factories and vehicles. But these sources of energy are not consistent. There are cloudy days and still nights. So, renewables work best with some kind of energy storage. Usually a battery that stores surplus energy when it is available, and supplies it when the Sun isn’t shining, or the wind isn’t blowing.

Sodium’s Moment

One interesting thing about Volta’s battery was that it used either ordinary salt water or caustic soda as an electrolyte between plates of different metals. Both salt and ‘caustic’ are compounds of the metal called sodium. Lithium, the wunderkind of modern batteries, wasn’t discovered until 17 years later.

After debuting on the battery stage, sodium left the scene like a one-song wonder. But it seems to be on a comeback tour now. Last year ended with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries picking up a $135-million stake in the British firm Faradion that has a head start in the field of sodium-ion batteries.

Other firms like California-based Natron (the name’s derived from sodium’s Latin name natrium) and China’s CATL have also rapidly improved their sodium-ion technologies. And there are many others.

So, why this sudden interest in sodium batteries? Are they better than lithium batteries? Will they allow cars to go 1000km on a single charge? Will they give your phone a week’s battery life?

Poor Man’s Lithium

Not really. Sodium and lithium are cousins on the periodic table. They live in the leftmost block. Lithium is one floor above sodium, and they behave alike in many ways, but lithium always tops the battery class. So sodium is the poor man’s lithium, and that’s what has made it so attractive now.

The problem with lithium is that its demand and price have hit the stratosphere. Lithium is a relatively scarce metal but everything from shavers to laptops and electric cars uses a lithium battery these days. So, the price of lithium hydroxide, which is a key raw material for making lithium-ion batteries, has shot up from about $4,500 in 2012 to almost $80,000. That’s why Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who needs tonnes of lithium to make Tesla cars and giant storage batteries, tweeted in April: “Price of lithium has gone to insane levels!”

But sodium hydroxide was at just $800 per tonne at the time. That’s to be expected because there’s hundreds of times more sodium than lithium in Earth’s crust, and it’s everywhere. With its vast coastline, India has an inexhaustible supply.

Not The First Choice

It’s abundant but sodium has some downsides as a battery material. Ounce for ounce, sodium batteries store less charge than lithium batteries. So you need a heavier battery for the same capacity. That’s why when the uses for rechargeable batteries were limited – camcorders and feature phones – scientists focused on developing lithium battery technology. In fact the 2019 Nobel in chemistry went to scientists who had worked in this field.

Sony launched the first gadget with a rechargeable lithium battery – a handheld video camera – in 1991. Since then, lithium batteries have improved a lot. The latest ones can be charged and discharged thousands of times. Current sodium batteries have a lot of catching up to do in this respect.

There’s also the question of scale. Although lithium is expensive, the scale at which lithium batteries are made keeps them affordable. Sodium batteries are expected to be 40% cheaper eventually, but that won’t happen until manufacturing scales up.

Made For Heavy Lifting

But sodium ion batteries have many advantages besides the promise of lower prices. Sodium itself is easy to extract and its batteries do not require cobalt – a metal mined at great human cost in central Africa.

While sodium batteries don’t store as much energy as the latest lithium batteries, by weight, they are far better than lead acid batteries used to start cars, and have reached the level where lithium batteries were a few years ago.

Faradion claims its batteries store about 160 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, which is similar to lithium batteries based on the older ‘lithium iron phosphate’ (LFP) technology. And with money pouring in for research, sodium batteries will keep getting better, even if they never catch up with lithium batteries.

Unlike lithium batteries, sodium batteries can be discharged completely for transportation, which eliminates the risk of fire in transit. They lose very little charge in cold conditions, and best of all, as they are very similar to lithium batteries, they can be made in the same factories without major retooling.

So, coming back to the question – is sodium about to dethrone lithium in the battery universe? The answer is they both might be kings in a battery multiverse. Lithium will remain the first choice for powerful cars, laptops and phones, while sodium will be a better fit for applications where high battery weight or low energy density do not matter. Giant storage batteries that power the grid, home inverters, and short-range vehicles like e-rickshaws and city cabs could all be run on it.

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Why John Hinckley Jr shot President Ronald Reagan

John Hinckley Jr listening to Jodie Foster's testimony

When Taxi Driver released in 1976, John Hinckley Jr – the man who shot and wounded US President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981 – was a student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. He was lonely, friendless and miserable. FBI’s description of him after his arrest has a very brief record of his friends: “none”.

John was a misfit in the classroom too. He wanted to be a singer and writer but was stuck in a business course. Every time he thought he would flunk a course, he withdrew from it (after failing to get a degree in six years, he finally dropped out in 1979).

Needless to say, John wasn’t making much progress at Texas Tech. He shifted to Los Angeles for a while, and while there saw Taxi Driver. He watched it again, and again, and again, altogether 16 times. By the time he came home to Evergreen, Colorado, for the holidays that year he was John Hinckley Jr in name only. Inside, he had transformed into Travis Bickle, the character played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. He was also madly, obsessively in love with Iris, the child prostitute played by Jodie Foster.

Correction: John was madly, obsessively in love with Jodie Foster. And his fixation started a string of capers that nearly resulted in the death of a US president.

Divorced from reality

In their 1985 book ‘Breaking Points’, John’s parents Jack and JoAnne Hinckley have described in detail how he lost touch with reality.

They were surprised and delighted when he called to tell them he finally had a girlfriend, Lynn Collins, who wanted to be an actress. John was so shy he would flee to his room everytime neighbours visited. He wouldn’t even play his guitar for his parents. And yet, he told them he had charmed Lynn at a laundromat.

It was too good to be true, as the FBI found out in its investigation. Lynn was a creation of John’s mind. She was his equivalent of Travis’s rich girlfriend in Taxi Driver. She was, perhaps, the first of many tales he wove over the next 5 years.

That 1976 winter when John came home, he asked his mother if she had seen Taxi Driver. She hadn’t, so she couldn’t guess his new wardrobe was inspired by Travis. More than style, John was hooked on Travis’s ideas. One of them was to ‘rescue’ Jodie from a ‘degenerate’ society, and the other to try and assassinate a president.

Jodie was the bigger obsession. In the Washington hotel room where John had stayed the day of the attempted assassination, FBI found a picture of President and Mrs Reagan. On it, John had written Jodie and he would occupy the White House one day. They also found a picture of Napoleon, under which he had written, “Napoleon and Josephine. John and Jodie.”

Peach Brandy

On New Year’s Eve in 1980, John had sat alone in his room at his parents’ house and recorded this message on his cassette recorder: “Anything that I might do in 1981 would be solely for Jodie Foster’s sake. I want to tell the world in some way that I worship and idolise her.”

He recorded it after refusing his father’s offer of champagne and asking for peach brandy instead. Yes, peach brandy – the drink that Travis soaked his bread in for breakfast.

But months before this declaration he had started making secret trips to New Haven in Connecticut where an 18-year-old Jodie had enrolled at Yale University in autumn of 1980. He called her at her dorm and recorded two of their conversations. Unknown to her, he stalked her on the campus, and is believed to have followed her around with a pistol with the idea that her murder followed by his suicide would link them in death.

His other plan was to kidnap Jodie, then hijack a plane and demand that the two of them “be installed in the White House”. He even wrote a note to the FBI threatening to kidnap her.

John was also slipping notes and letters under Jodie’s dormitory door. The first set came in September. The second in October or November (Jodie wasn’t sure), and the last on March 6, 1981. A note in it read: “Jodie Foster, love, just wait. I will rescue you very soon. Please cooperate.”

When she appeared to testify at John’s trial, Jodie said she had immediately recognised it as the type of letter Travis had sent to Iris in Taxi Driver.

John Travis

By March 1981, John had morphed into Travis completely. When his parents refused to let him stay at home – hoping he would take charge of his life – he signed the register at a motel as “J. Travis”. John Travis.

The day he shot Reagan, John was supposed to be in Hollywood, talking to his music industry contacts. His mother had put him on a plane to California herself. So, how did he land up in Washington DC?

It was his Jodie obsession again. He had boarded a coast-to-coast Greyhound bus from Hollywood to New Haven. After travelling for 4 days, he had arrived in Washington DC, and stopped for the night. By chance he read Reagan’s itinerary in a newspaper and decided to kill him, to impress Jodie.

Yes, there was no political angle or animosity. John had in fact been pleased when Reagen won the presidential race a few months earlier. “Maybe there’s hope for this country yet,” he had told his father.

It didn’t matter to him which president he shot as long as he could be famous. In October 1980 he had been arrested with 3 guns at Nashville airport on a day when then President Jimmy Carter was present in the city. Nobody suspected what he was up to, so he was released with a paltry $62.5 fine.

Reagan unfortunately became a casualty of John’s Jodie fixation. FBI found a letter John had left behind for Jodie in his Washington hotel room in the afternoon of March 30, 1981:

“Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you, whether it be in total obscurity or whatever. I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you.”

Although John shot and injured the president and 3 others in plain sight from 15 feet away (6 shots in 1.7 seconds, according to the FBI), the jury held him not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He was sent to a psychiatric institution but it took them a while to recalibrate his sense of reality. In that time he managed to send a 4-page letter to The New York Times that, among other things, said:

“The shooting outside the Washington Hilton Hotel was the greatest love offering in the world…. At one time Miss Foster was a star and I was the insignificant fan. Now everything is changed. I am Napoleon and she is Josephine. I am Romeo and she is Juliet…. I may be in prison and she may be making a movie in Paris or Hollywood but Jodie and I will always be together, in life and in death.”

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When a plane flew away on its own from Delhi's Safdarjung airport

Piper Super Cruiser reference image

Remember Unstoppable, the 2010 Denzel Washington movie? A runaway train hurtling full speed ahead towards a town, laden with a toxic cargo. Now, imagine a plane flying without a pilot. Nobody inside the cockpit at all. Impossible, you say? But such incidents happen. Not with the cumbersome airliners that come to mind first, but with small and simple aircraft.

It happened in New Delhi once. On January 16, 1961, a Piper Super Cruiser belonging to Lucknow Flying Club took off “automatically”, rather, “autonomously”, from Safdarjung Aerodrome with nobody on board. The pint-sized single-engine craft, weighing just 430kg — a Maruti 800 weighs 650kg — zoomed down the runway and was airborne before the bewildered pilot could jump inside the cockpit. Minutes later, the plane crashed to the ground, “substantially damaged”.

The case summary published in the annual report of Accidents Investigation Branch of the Civil Aviation Department, Ministry of Transport and Communications, read: “The accident is attributed to an error of the pilot in not exercising adequate precautions while starting the engine by swinging the propeller without a competent person at the controls.”

The matter came up for discussion in Parliament on February 28, 1961 under the heading: “Automatic taking off of aircraft from Safdarjung Airport”.

Members expressed surprise. Jaswant Singh from Rajasthan asked, “Whether automatically the engines got started, or whether the engines were already running and the plane took off?”

Dr P Subbarayan, then minister of transport and communications, replied: “Even in the case of a motorcar, when a man starts it by turning the handle, the car being in gear, it starts off even without the driver.”

Babubhai Chinai, a member from Mumbai, remarked: “But we have never heard about the aircraft and therefore I was enquiring about it.”

Subbarayan then explained that, unable to fire up the engine with the self-starter, the pilot had got off the plane to start it by turning the propeller. Unfortunately, he had not placed chocks in front of the wheels, nor left anyone at the controls. The engine spun to life, and the plane sped off with the pilot scrambling behind it.

Most small vintage planes are capable of such mischief, but the Aeronca Champion has a reputation for it. In 1997, a Champ landed in Ohio, USA, with mechanical problems. The pilot got off and started the engine by hand-cranking the propeller, but before he could jump in again, the plane took off and flew for about 160km — about an hour — before the fuel ran out and it crashed.

Aeronca Champion reference image

In another case, in 2001, a Champ took off while its owner was checking the running engine. It crashed after flying for about 56km.

And at an air show in 2009, a biplane with enough fuel to fly 240km took off on its own, only to crash into nearby trees.

A brief history of monkeypox

In the 1950s the world was getting serious about fighting polio. Labs in Europe and North America were busy making and testing vaccines. But they needed an army of lab monkeys to do their job. So, thousands of monkeys were shipped from Asia to these labs.

In 1958, a lab in Denmark noticed a strange smallpox-like disease in monkeys that had arrived from Malaysia. Tests were done at the State Serum Institute in Copenhagen, and scientists realised they had discovered a brand-new virus.

Because the virus and the disease occurred in monkeys, they named it monkeypox.

Tracing link to Africa

Between 1958 and 1968, several outbreaks of monkeypox occurred in lab monkeys, and because all the monkeys had come from Asia, scientists at first thought the virus reservoir was in Asia.

To test this theory, they took blood samples from more than a thousand monkeys in India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan, but found that none of the animals had monkeypox antibodies. This was odd because a viral infection produces antibodies that can be found in an animal’s blood even years later.

The mystery of the monkeypox virus’s natural reservoir was solved in the 1970s after the first case of monkeypox in a human was confirmed in Zaire – now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo – in central Africa.

This time scientists collected blood samples from animals in central and western Africa, and sure enough 7 species of monkeys and 2 species of squirrels had monkeypox antibodies.

While the mystery of monkeypox’s origin had been solved, one question remained – how had Asian monkeys become infected with it?

The answer was that, along with the Asian monkeys, the European and American labs had also imported some monkeys from west Africa, scientists Frank Fenner, Riccardo Wittek and Keith Dumbell wrote in their 1989 book, ‘The Orthopoxviruses’.

The Asian and African monkeys had either come in contact with each other or the virus had been transferred through their human handlers. After strict handling rules were enforced in 1968, monkeypox outbreaks in labs stopped.

But the discovery of human monkeypox set alarm bells ringing for other reasons.

Threat to smallpox fight

A global campaign to wipe out smallpox had started in 1967. It was so successful that by 1972, Americans didn’t need smallpox vaccinations. And on the 8th of May, 1980, the World Health Organization declared the whole world was smallpox-free. It’s the only disease we have been able to eradicate so far.

However, in 1970 scientists feared that if the monkeypox virus – which was similar to smallpox and produced almost identical symptoms – infected humans, it would jeopardise the ‘Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program’.

WHO asked the labs affected by monkeypox in America and Europe if they had recorded cases of animal-to-human transmission, but none of them had. And yet, a 9-month-old village boy who was admitted to the Basankusu Hospital in Zaire on the 1st of September, 1970 had tested positive for monkeypox.

His village had been vaccinated for smallpox, and nobody else in the area had reported fever with a rash, so smallpox was ruled out. But the boy himself was not vaccinated. He was the only unvaccinated member of his family. He got fever on the 22nd of August and developed a rash on the 24th.

While he was at the Basankusu Hospital, his pox scabs were collected and sent to Moscow, where tests showed he had monkeypox. He made a slow recovery over the next two months, but just when doctors were thinking of discharging him, he caught measles in the hospital on the 23rd of October and died 6 days later.

A poor spreader

Now that it was clear that monkeypox could infect humans, scientists became more vigilant. In 1971, suspected cases of smallpox in Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast turned out to be monkeypox infections.

But the good news was that monkeypox didn’t affect humans outside its natural reservoir in central and western Africa. Of the 404 cases reported between 1970 and 1986, about 90% occurred in small villages inside tropical rain forests where people led a hunter-gatherer life and had frequent contact with wild animals.

In one case a chimpanzee abducted a 6-month-old child from a Zaire village. People chased and rescued the child but a week later it came down with fever and a rash that turned out to be monkeypox. Zaire had the maximum cases of monkeypox – 386 out of the 404

Data also showed that monkeypox was not very contagious among humans. With smallpox, 58% of the contacts of a patient used to get infected, but with monkeypox this percentage was just 9% among people who had not taken the smallpox vaccine

In case you are wondering, the smallpox vaccine does provide a high degree of protection against monkeypox because the two viruses are so similar. And in the 1980s data from Africa showed that most of the severe monkeypox infections and deaths occurred in unvaccinated children.

Another interesting and reassuring finding was that monkeypox outbreaks naturally died out after a maximum of 11 steps of human-to-human transmission. That explains why even after lurking in the rain forests of Africa for centuries monkeypox could not become a common human disease even when the smallpox vaccine wasn’t around

But if monkeypox was always a disease of central and western Africa, how has it spread in Europe now?

Clues from America

We don’t know for sure, but the 2003 monkeypox outbreak in America might provide clues. That year, 82 infections were recorded in the US during May and June. New York Times journalist Denise Grady has described the chain of events in her book ‘Deadly Invaders’.

She says the first US cases appeared in the state of Wisconsin. A family got infected from its pet prairie dog, which is not really a dog but a squirrel. The family recovered but the sick pet didn’t.

In another case, an 11-year-old boy got monkeypox after his friend’s prairie dogs bit him. Later, it was found that every single US case had started from contact with a prairie dog. One particular animal managed to infect 18 people. A 10-year-old girl who owned 3 prairie dogs in Illinois became so sick she had to be given morphine to suppress her pain. She had sores inside her throat, Grady writes.

So how did prairie dogs, which are an American species, become carriers of monkeypox? Grady says owning prairie dogs was a fad in 2003, with people paying up to 150 dollars for one.

A Chicago pet store called Phil’s Pocket Pets sold them in large numbers, but it also had a giant Gambian pouched rat imported from Ghana in west Africa. The prairie dogs probably got infected from the African rat.

And Phil’s was just one shop. Altogether 800 animals had been sent from Ghana in one shipment in April 2003. All the imported animals had to be traced and put down. Prairie dogs exposed to the imported animals also had to be killed.

Had the disease spread among America’s wild animals it would have become impossible to eradicate. Luckily, the outbreak ended without any human death, but the US banned the import of African rodents after it, and also the sale of prairie dogs as pets.

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Clive Branson: British soldier who wanted freedom for India

Sent to India just before the Quit India Movement, Branson was not at all like India’s British rulers. His letters reveal a man deeply in love with the country

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It’s February 1943. The Japanese are advancing on India from the east and the country is in the middle of the Quit India Movement. Not the best time to be a white sahib in India, but an English soldier camping in Karwar, Karnataka, is winning hearts.

He’s a poet and painter, and visits the local school one day to talk to the children about Wordsworth’s poetry. One of the boys asks him, “Britain has ruled India for 150 years – if India conquered Britain, how long would it rule?”

Instead of being annoyed, the soldier is impressed. “The brightness and intelligence of these children is splendid,” he writes in a letter to his wife Noreen.

It’s not the first time he has expressed his admiration for Indians to her. While based in Gulunche near Pune, he sees women making a road, and writes: “What dignity the women labourers here in India give to the very primitive making of a country lane.”

Who is this man, so out of character with Indian’s British masters? His name is Clive Branson. Born to a British army officer in Ahmednagar in 1907, he has returned to the country after 35 years.

While in India, Branson writes many letters to Noreen. They are published as a book, ‘British Soldier in India’, after his death in 1944, and it’s through them we know his views about India.

Sensitive to suffering

Almost the first thing Branson does on arrival in Bombay, in May 1942, is search for a book on Hindi. Then, on the road to Gulunche near Pune, he sees how poor most Indians are and writes: “After 175 years of imperialism in India, the conditions are a howling disgrace.”

Later, while based in Dhond, he expresses the same feelings in stronger words: “However much people at home believe in British imperialism, there are 400 million (Indians) who know by bitter daily experience the reality.”

As ‘rations corporal’ of the Gulunche camp, he goes to town daily to buy provisions, and uses the outings as an opportunity to make friends with the locals and learn Marathi. But in the camp, he has to tolerate the older soldiers who are hostile to Indians. Branson calls them “bloody idiots” and writes he is ashamed to think of himself as one of them.

When riots break out after the arrest of Congress leaders at the start of the Quit India Movement, the troops at Gulunche are sent out on law and order duty, but Branson avoids it because he regards it as “warfare against the people”.

His sympathies are with the Indian rioters: “Even though one does not agree with what the people are doing, one understands why they do it.”

He is a communist who has fought in the Spanish Civil War and spent time in a concentration camp. A keen observer of politics, he mocks the British Labour Party for urging the Congress leaders to call off the movement.

“How brilliant! doesn’t the Labour Party know that the Congress leaders are in jail, and that is why the rioting is going on – anarchistic because without leadership?”

Likewise, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill implies in a speech that the riots in India are a Congress conspiracy to help the Japanese, Branson writes: “Churchill’s speech on India was just filth.”

When a soldier at the camp tells him he is lowering ‘white prestige’ by being friendly with the Indian tea and fruit sellers, Branson retorts: “The fact that white sahibs go into cheap brothels with native women must do much to uphold this prestige.”

He can’t stand the condescending manner Englishmen assume towards Indians. He tells Noreen: “When this war is over, we must come back to India as civilised friends.” In another letter he says: “I know I shall want to come back to India, where I can feel I am with humanity and not just one of a stuck-up little part of it.”

One night, he loses his cool when white officers hit and shout at a young Indian. “I am certain I shall not end my tour of duty in the army in India without getting into some trouble through sticking up for the Indians. But I know who is right,” he writes.

Part of a painting by Clive's daughter, Rosa Branson. She made it as a tribute to him in 2009. It shows him against the backdrop of the British war cemetery in Myanmar (Burma)

Politically conscious

Branson’s letters also record interesting political events in India. For example, his letter of September 26, 1942 mentions a campaign in Gujarat’s Kaira district (home to Amul) to collect 1 lakh signatures from 700 villages to demand the release of Congress leaders from jail.

When the British propaganda machinery tries to tar the image of student protesters with a rumour that some of them have raped a woman, Branson writes, “fancy Congress students demonstrating for the release of Nehru by raping women”.

The poverty of the countryside pains him. “A journey through this country is indeed painful – there is such a vast mass of human happiness, human intelligence, gone to waste.”

So when an officer asks him to paint scenes from army life, he writes: “If I paint at all, I want to paint the Indians...my conception of life is my conception of painting. I don’t paint things I want to forget.”

At the end of 1942, when Bombay is gripped by food shortage and workers are spending up to eight hours a day in food queues, Branson feels depressed at his inability to do anything to meet the “huge situation… so little able to atone for the stinking, filthy, crooked, hypocritical bastards of so-called Englishmen who rule this great country.”

The seaside break in Karwar in 1943 is a pleasant interlude on his tour. “I shall never forget these fishermen, these peasants, these children and their little town,” he tells Noreen. But he doesn’t know he has only a year left to live. On February 25, 1944 he is killed while fighting the Japanese in Burma.

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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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Lost now, this gorge once rivalled Bhakra

The Satluj’s gorge at Sunni, below Shimla, was once considered an ideal dam site, but it is lost in the waters of another dam now. A quick brush with history...

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River gorges are beautiful. Water forcing its way between bare, vertical cliffs fills the heart with fear, awe and wonder. But gorges are useful too. There’s no better place than a gorge to build a dam because nature has already done most of the work of building walls around the river. You just need to drop the last piece in the middle.

When British engineers were searching for a site to build a large dam on the Satluj, before WW-I, they decided on the gorge below Bhakra village in Bilaspur because the rocky walls on its two sides were neatly aligned. More importantly, the sides connected under the riverbed, making a very strong frame. The rock was also very hard, which is why the gorge had remained narrow over hundreds of thousands of years.

An official note from 1919 says: “Construction of a dam at this site will be equivalent to restoring a small portion of the original rock barrier that had been eroded by direct river action.”

A dam on the Satluj was needed to prevent not only floods but also famine in parts of present-day Haryana, but the project kept getting delayed and the dam was not built until well after India’s Independence. More than half a century passed between the first recommendation and the dam’s construction.

But if you browse through the old papers, you will find the first idea was to dam the Satluj a long way upstream – right under Shimla’s nose.

Between two states

The first official recommendation for a dam on the Satluj came in 1908. Sir Louis Dane, who was lieutenant governor of united Punjab, travelled along the Satluj from Shimla to Bilaspur that year, and on November 8 he wrote a note recommending two sites “for dams for storage purposes and power development…”

The first of these was the gorge at Sunni, directly below Shimla on the road to Mandi. In those days, most of the Himachal hills fell under small princely states. Sunni was the headquarters or capital of a state called Bhajji that lay on the Sutlej’s left bank. Across the river was another state called Suket. An iron suspension bridge spanned the river at the narrowest point between them, and Dane thought this gorge was an excellent location for a dam.

Incidentally, many years after he retired, Dane was one of the people injured when Shahid Udham Singh opened fire on General Michael O’Dwyer in 1940, to avenge the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Soon after Dane’s recommendation, the English traveller M.C. Forbes journeyed from Shimla to Kullu and left a description of the gorge in his notes: “Nothing can be more magnificent than the rush of the river through this narrow gorge,” he wrote. “On either side the cliffs descend sheer to the water’s edge, and apparently far below it, full of great caverns, fissures, and round hollows…”

He was aware of Dane’s recommendation for a dam at Sunni, and seemed sure the dam would be built there – “it is at this narrow gully that the dam would have to be built, probably with a long tunnel under the hill on the Suket side, through which the water would flow.”

A lost world

Forbes crossed the suspension bridge that was jointly owned by Bhajji and Suket states, and entered the village of Tattapani, which had a rest house and was famous for its sulphur springs. The springs were just a few hundred metres away from the river’s sandy bank and their water was “so hot that the hand can just be held in it at the points where it bubbles up.”

Anyone who travelled from Shimla to Mandi past Naldehra even 15 or 20 years ago would agree that Forbes painted a fitting word picture of Tattapani and the Sunni gorge.

In September 2000 – the first time I visited Tattapani – the century-old suspension bridge was still the only way across the Satluj. It seemed to me the wooden planks shook under the wheels of my bike, but buses crossed it easily every day. Perhaps, the roar of the river below made me edgy.

Four years later, a wide concrete bridge had come up slightly upstream of the gorge and the old bridge was restricted for light use. On my third visit, in 2006, I found the old bridge had burnt down. Charred timbers hung from its middle. But the Sunni gorge was still as spectacular as ever, and Tattapani on the other bank a livelier tourist resort than Forbes could have imagined.

All that is lost now. The Sunni gorge never became a dam, but in 2015 the waters of ‘Koldam’ – a new dam downstream in Bilaspur – swallowed it and the springs of Tattapani. What Forbes had described as a “beautiful, clear, greeny-blue” river “bordered with date palms, bananas and giant bamboos” turned into a vast, still sheet of water.

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