This column from Business World of 22 January 2004 is about Minoo Nariman Dastur. He was well settled in the US as a steel expert. In 1954, the US government engaged him to help it modernize the Mysore steel plant to which it had given aid. When he came to India, Minoo had the misfortune of meeting Prime Minister Nehru, who asked him to come back and serve the country. So he did. But the government bought steel plants readymade from England, Germany and the USSR, which brought in their own steel experts. So Minoo got little work from the government. But he did not go back to the States; he set up a consultancy in Calcutta. That is where I met him in 1968, when I was doing a study on steel industry.
A memory of Minoo Dastur
The last time I met Minoo Dastur, I was late. I
apologized. He said, “But not at all! You slept the sleep of the innocent!” He
was a driven man, as I shall describe. But for a fanatic, he was extremely
affable, likable, admirable.
Minoo Dastur was a steel
technologist. He had worked in steel plants. In the late 1950s he set up M N
Dastur and Co, a consultancy to build steel plants. That was the time of
Mahalanobis strategy; the government planned to put heavy industry to the fore,
and build machines to build machines before it went on to build machines and
then, some time in the future, actually produce consumer goods to raise
people’s standard of living. Until that happened, the people would have to make
do with the minimum supply of consumer goods, made as far as possible by
cottage industry. It was a two-pronged strategy of maximizing the growth rate
of the stock of machines which would raise productivity, and maximizing
employment by producing consumer goods in the most labour-intensive way
possible.
I got interested in steel because
I wanted to know how controls worked on the ground. Steel was rationed at that
time; there was a seven-storey office of the Steel Controller in Calcutta. It
was an extremely popular office. Hordes of intending house-builders and agents
thronged it, trying to get their files pushed through the labyrinth. Hundreds
of clerks did their best to stop files moving, and received welcome
gratification for overcoming their resistance. But all that bustle was history
when I last went there, around 1968. The economy slumped in 1966; demand for
steel fell, and there was a surplus. Numerous mini-steel plants came up all
over the country, which rerolled old rails and plates and sold bars and rods to
the construction industry. The crowds of permit-seekers melted away, and so did
the bribes. Without the bribes, the clerks found the Steel Controller’s office
inhospitable; they got transfers, and the office became desolate.
I met Minoo around the same time.
He had a single obsession: he wanted India to produce 64 million tons of steel
– an absurd ambition when the output was perhaps 5 million tons, and over twice
today’s production. He was completely convinced that steel was the backbone of
development, and was fully behind the government’s dream of making machines to
make machines to make machines.
But he was also a great steel
technologist, and the nation put him to little use. The government wanted to
build the steel plants with foreign aid, so we got Durgapur from British aid,
Rourkela from German aid, and Bhilai from Soviet aid. With the aid came the
technology; none of the patrons of the three steel plants had any use for Minoo
and his consultancy firm. So while so much investment went into steel, Minoo
never found a user for his expertise. His firm survived on work from Tata Iron
and Steel Company.
TISCO was even then a great
company. The contrast between it and the new government steel plants was
palpable. The latter were spanking new. They were huge, and their rolling mills
were automatized. By comparison, the plant in Jamshedpur was ancient. The open
hearth furnaces were ancient; a good deal of the equipment went back to 1909.
The whole place looked so cramped and grimy.
There was an equally striking
difference in the way the plants were run. You went into a government steel
plant, and found so many people loitering about. The converters were controlled
by computers of that time. But even the control rooms had people who had no
business there.
In Jamshedpur, everyone knew his
job, and no one who should not have been there was there. The expert was at the
top, whatever his designation. I strayed off a bit while a furnace was being
tapped. I was told off by the foreman; he said, “While you are here, you do
what I tell you.”
But the Tatas, who were far
better, did not get licences to expand, while money was poured into new white
elephants. And Minoo never got work, although billions were poured into steel
plants. However bad life may be today, experts like him have a much more
fulfilling life today. That is one of the reforms’ achievement, and I am proud
of it.
