For the first time since the passing of my father more than two decades ago, I am glad he is not around to be devastated by the corporatisation and eventual privatisation of ordnance factories across India. (The move is on hold following a workers’ strike threat.)
I should have seen this coming when the Centre handed over the manufacture of the Rafale aircraft to a private player instead of giving it to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. HAL is a name I grew up with because my father was with the IOFS—Indian Ordnance Factories Services, a service less glamorous than the Indian Administrative Service but one which has done more to defend India’s borders than any other organisation.
People talk of the Indian Railways as the biggest network the British set up with the first railway line from Bombay to Thane in 1853. I recall an editorial in The Times of London when Prince Charles and Princess Diana had visited India in 1992. Indian newspapers were ga-ga over them and that goodwill completely flummoxed the British newspapers. The Times said in its editorial, that it could not imagine Russian newspapers going bananas over the descendants of Lenin and Stalin in the former
Soviet Union 50 years after perestroika and glasnost.
For they, like the British to India, had done so much harm to their country. The Times went on to say that the only two gifts the British ever gave India were the Indian Railways and the English language.
There was more about the English language but the Indian Railways, which even today is the best network anywhere in the world, was not set up for Indians but to move British loot from various parts of the country towards the ports and onward to England. In the years since Independence we know what the railways have meant to the masses but even these are now being privatised.
However, The Times failed to mention another golden gift by the British to India that predates even the Great Indian Peninsular Railway (as it was called before Independence). That is the Ordnance Factories. The first Ordnance Factory was set up in the 1780s by the East India Company with a Gun and Shell Factory in Calcutta (which is where the Ordnance Factories Board is headquartered even today). It took 20 years for it to kick into production (1802), making the network of ordnance factories the oldest government body in India. The British added 17 more factories to suit their military interests until 1947 and independent India added 23 more factories, bringing the total to 41.
This is where my father came in. He started his career as a small worker in the ordnance factories under the British who would not allow any native to be in charge of any of the specifics at these arms and ammunition factories. But my father was a metallurgist knowing all the melting and solidifying properties of all the metals and alloys required in the manufacture of bullets, shells, shell casings, fighter aircraft, even jeeps and jongas and, of course, the tanks rolling on the borders.
The large scale process of indigenisation began after Independence but particularly in the 1960s when Yashwantrao Chavan, the first CM of Maharashtra, joined the Nehru Cabinet and became union defence minister. He sanctioned many, many ordnance factories in his home state of Maharashtra and we moved from the sprawling British bungalows in places like Avadi near Madras, Katni near Jabalpur and Ambernath near Bombay to more compact homes in less developed areas of the state like Ambajhari near Nagpur, Bhandara near Gondia and Chanda near Chandrapur, all in Vidarbha which Chavan had promised to develop in return for their accession to Maharashtra during the states’ organisation.
My father and two of his colleagues walked miles and miles from the outskirts of Nagpur into the jungles to the west until they found the ideal location for the Ambajhari ordnance factory. I grew up on that vast estate as my father was never transferred out thereafter, for his specific metallurgical skills were greatly required to get the factory up and running. Usually it takes 20 years, so he even received an extension at superannuation until the process was complete.
During those years, I saw many private players make tracks towards our ordnance estate with gift hampers for the officers, hoping for a favourable consideration in supply of raw material. They were unequivocally turned away as the officers wouldn’t allow them to mar India’s defence interests with poor quality goods.
India had come through a couple of wars by then and the political situation at the borders was such that more were expected. “We cannot play with the safety and lives of our soldiers,” the pioneers of the indigenisation would say. So everything had to be down to perfect for them— guns that would explode in their faces, bullets that would get stuck in the guns, tanks that might not roll in moist terrain, aircraft that might not take off due to faulty material or technology could not be countenanced. Army officers posted there for inspection marvelled at their commitment to perfection.
My values of patriotism and passionate devotion to work came from watching my father at his job. He was convinced no profiteering private player could be trusted with the defence of the nation. In these more avaricious times, I am convinced of that too. So will, I hope, the bureaucrats.
Sujata Anandan
Senior journalist and political commentator
Email: sujata.anandan@gmail.com