That fortuitous 1963 meeting in Mettur brought together Ramani and the professors from the Indian Institute of Science. Together, they set out on a mission to make their work on silicon metal a reality.
In the twenty-two years that went by, the two teams, one from Mettur led by Seshamani, and the other from Bangalore led by two junior scientists from the Institute, found the project fun and challenging. Their joint effort had an interesting side to it. During the 1970s, their collaboration was, in fact, unprecedented. In India, scientific research and manufacturing often existed independently of each other. Research projects rarely left the lab and industry continued to import technology for everything.
Despite many challenges, by the end of the decade, the project had developed sufficiently for Mettur Chemicals to apply for a manufacturing licence to produce silicon metal, which could be used in the creation of solar photovoltaic cells – a technology that was supposed to reduce India’s dependence on imported oil. By the early 1980s, the test reactors at Mettur were producing sufficient material for the new company, christened Metkem Silicon, to scale up into production.
But something weird happened.
Metkem’s market analysis had projected the total Indian demand for silicon metal to grow from insignificance to a modest 25 metric tonnes a year over the next ten years. And this was based on an assessment of how quickly India rolled out its adoption of energy generation from solar power.
But one morning, a news item – innocuous for the public, but shocking for Metkem and the Indian Institute of Science – announced the government’s plans to set up a plant to produce 200 metric tonnes of silicon metal a year.
And to make things insulting to both, the government project to be set up by the Department of Electronics, would import technology from a Dow Corning subsidiary in the United States.
This made no sense and people objected, and the resulting uproar reached the highest levels of government.
This story begins at the Department of Electronics in New Delhi, in the early stages of this controversy.
New Delhi, 1984. Late September
The smoke from roadside braziers hung frozen as if in a hyperreal urban mural. It was a foggy start to an unseasonably early winter and the air was thick and still.
But Pandey knew it was winter because he smelled kerosene on his clothes. Autorickshaw drivers in New Delhi would often mix their petrol with the cheaper kerosene to save money. The resulting emissions, which are not as noticeable in summer, now stuck to his clothes and left his skin covered with a fine patina of kerosene.
He sniffled, sneezed, and then was alarmed. He couldn’t afford to fall ill at the start of the winter season, he told himself. A winter cold could cling to one like a shadow. Pandey turned up the collar of his suit jacket around his ears and hurried into his place of employment, the Department of Electronics (DoE), where he worked as a principal scientific officer.
This important-sounding title brought him no cheer. He found his workplace intolerable. Although housed in a post-colonial modern building, the inner offices of the DoE were as dank and dreary as any other government office.
“I work in a Dickensian hovel,” he once wrote to a boyfriend back in California, where he had attended college and worked for several years.
This Dickensian hovel was warmed by coil-type room heaters, which were also used to heat up scruffy aluminium lunch boxes. Wooden tables marred with coffee cup rings and yellowing teacups, a few with their handles still intact, punctuated the ambient space. A leaky water cooler stood in a puddle of its own making, and the unventilated office canteen bore the charm of an open-pit latrine. But such were the digs for the rank and file of a typical Indian government office.
Pandey walked through the general hall towards his personal office, which, for no discernible reason, was fitted with western saloon-type swinging doors. As he pushed through them, one of the doors broke off its upper hinge, leaving only the lower one intact as it fell forward, its sharp edge digging painfully into his thigh.
Pandey gritted his teeth. An irrational rage came spluttering loudly out of him, which he directed at a peon sitting nearby. The man, unperturbed by the door incident, sat with one leg propped up on his chair, excavating his ear with a toothpick that he had previously used to spear fruit from a fruit-chaat platter. His betel-leaf-stained smile and incomplete set of dentures only fuelled Pandey’s frustration.
“Idiot!” Pandey shuddered, “what nightmare is this? And I am supposed to evaluate the future of silicon metal technology in this…this…I don’t even know what this is…!”
Pandey settled into his office. It was a cramped space filled with the detritus of a busy government worker.
He shoved a tower of files to one side of his desk and sat down to deal with a problem that seemed to consume him almost entirely – his boss, Anand Seshadri.
