Waning Interest in Coal: My unfolding Voyage 080

Coal helped power the Industrial Revolution and was the dominant industrial fuel till petroleum oil was discovered and began to be exploited. The 1971-73 oil crisis resulting from OPEC cartel decision to raise oil prices substantially and control oil production and supplies. This in turn led to a resurgence of the coal industry even while researchers, scientists and technologists gave a thrust on energy conservation, energy use efficiency and development of commercial ways to exploit non-conventional energy as well as new ways of exploiting coal for energy generation. By that late 1970s considerable progress has been made, especially in the advanced western countries. The subject of energy had by then become a hot subject of discussion among corporate managers. My teacher had written an article on the economics of nuclear power in the Economic & Political Weekly, which published my comments a few weeks later.

For a while I tended to become an energy economist with emphasis on Coal. The opportunity to give a lecture on Coal Industry’s future at a seminar organized by the Tata Training Orgagnisation at Jamshedpur brought me in touch with the US Information Service local director, one Mr. Dasgupta, a former Professor of economics or political science. I used to get regular invitation to lecture and discussion programs organized by him at Kolkata and even got gifts of books on economics and got into the mailing list of Span, a US publicity magazine. Mr Dasupta would one day invite me to his residence to share coffee with him. His wife had arranged delicious snacks. While we were discussing various things, the couple took some interest in my parents and family. It seemed to me that they were surprised to know that I had already married and have two sons. But I did mention that I have a younger brother who was still a bachelor. Probably, the Dasguptas had thought me as an interesting bachelor to be explored for matrimony!

But besides economics of energy, I was getting interested in the discipline of business management and the attitude and behaviour of people within organizations. I recall that at the Seminar at the Tata Training centre at Jamshedpur, the West Bengal industries secretary or director participated in a panel discussion. I had asked him question when the discussions centered on industrial relations and production loss. My question was how his department and offices in the districts of West Bengal monitored the incipient worsening of industrial relations situation in individual factories or industrial belts and took proactive steps to nip a strike or lockout in the bud. His reply was astonishing but revealed the difference between professional corporate managers and bureaucrats. He mentioned that his department can only act after the news of an industrial strike, lockout or violence has already occurred. The perspective of government bureaucrats perhaps continues to be the same even now in West Bengal.

The interactions with the US Information Service were open and transparent and the lady economic attaché who participated in the seminar was cordial. But I had also an opportunity to meet people at the Russian consular office. A letter from a Russian company had landed in Coal India. My engineer colleagues thought that they could pass on at least one running about task to my corporate planning department: the job of getting a translation of the letter from Russian language to English. I contacted the local consular office for help. They asked me to visit their office. And, that was an interesting experience. From the gate, I had started sensing an air of suspicion as I was being led from one vacant room and corridor to another. It was probably after half an hour of long walking and waiting in the sofa in a room, I could meet someone who would try to know the purpose of my coming there and examine the documents we wanted to be translated from Russian to English. He kept a copy of the document, said that his office did not have the facility of such translation and assured me that they would get back to us if they could provide and translation help over phone. I was then escorted out through the same process of walking through corridors and rooms one after the other. I do not remember of ultimately getting any help. Te reception at the Russian consular office and the little interaction gave me the impression that the people there looked at me with considerable suspicion and they were reluctant to help. But I continued my subscription to Soviet Land, the Russian promotional magazine. I also used to get the monthly promotional magazine of the communist eastern Democratic Republic of Germany. These foreign country image promotion magazines, despite their covert brainwashing literature, did contain interesting knowledge about the people and their life styles as also about their technology, culture and socio-economic environment. Those days Indians had very little access to information on what was happening in foreign countries. It was not the globalised world that we see today four decades later.

Whether for the Chairman, or for the Corporate Planning documents or for my own articles for the newspaper, my quota of handwriting and dictation to stenographer-secretary (a category of office employees along with the category of typists have been under the phase of extinction with almost everyone now keying in their compositions on the desk-top or lap-top computers) had tremendously increased during the Coal India days. I must have composed equivalent in magnitude to the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana combined. The speed of writing had also increased. I was getting increasingly bored. I tried to get back into academics. I applied for a post-doctoral fellowship at the Economics Department of the Presidency College (now University) and met my teacher for a discussion. But I had to regret his kind offer as the scholarship was hardly 40% of my earnings from Coal India and with no medical benefits. After all, I had to manage a family of four now. I tried a US Foundation scholarship for young managers, got selected from the eastern region but was unsuccessful at the all-India selection stage as I had not yet arranged any tie-up with an American University. I tried directly with one American University with a proposal on what I intended to work on in the area of managerial economics. The Professor there asked me to come and join but said he cannot upfront provide any funding. Meanwhile however, I completed my compulsory correspondence course study for all the papers for the intermediate examination of the Institute of Cost & Works Accountants, learning in the process some elements of financial accounting, cost accounting, commercials laws. This would help me in future.

Even as I was serving Coal India my direct relations with coal in life was coming to an end. From our childhood days we were used to food cooked on portable clay-tin- steel rod ovens that used coal (I came to know in Coal India, that this was called soft-coke) as the main fuel with cow-dung cakes that would help the initial lighting of fire. When I had joined Coal India, soft-coke coal was still the dominant cooking fuel in the city of Calcutta though the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) was being supplied by Oil companies bt it was difficult to get a connection and regular supplies, besides being costly. For my own small family, soft-coke oven was not suitable, apart from being messy. So, we used the coal-based oven once or twice a week but largely depended on kerosene fueled burners (stove) for cooking. But kerosene itself was scarce and often sod in the black market at high prices. So, we were looking for a solution to this cooking fuel problem. An elderly mining engineer colleague, a bachelor, suggested me that I use the electric –powered oven. I purchased a Kathlene electric oven though I knew the electricity (being energy converted from coal) would be costlier and there was this additional problem of safety. I was already using a small electric dip heater my younger brother brought from Poland (he married a Polish lady he picked up while on a training programme there) for us to warm up water for tea and bath (we were still not using electric water geysers). But as it turned out this was just the transition period before we had to move over to LPG as domestic cooking fuel. My direct association with coal was in the last phase.