Stealing a Design for a Treatment Plant

In India, one need's to be a thief, an unscrupulous businessman, a politician, a bribe giver and a bribe taker to achieve success and amass wealth beyond one's true intrinsic worth.  Here is one such story of a Corporate group who have risen to fame and fortune by just such criminal acts, which continues to this day in several other fields ranging from telecommunications to petrochemicals.

46. STEALING A DESIGN FOR A TREAMENT PLANT

Stealing is not an uncommon occupation for many in India : on the streets, the pick pockets steal wallets  ; from the hallowed halls of legislatures, corrupt politicians steal and grab land while watching porn on the side for self edification ; from the ivory towers of academia, academic fraudsters steal reports and research papers from technical journals, and from plush air conditioned offices, greedy businessmen and industrialists steal intellectual property, indulge in bribery, price fixing, share price manipulations among other vile anti national activities.  This is a story of one such common thief of the last variety, who unfortunately, but appropriately enough in India has become a leading Business house.  In any other civilized country with a decent judicial system, these worthies would be behind bars for life.

In the years 1981-82, I was approaching the end of my stint as an environmental engineer working in Hindustan Dorr-Oliver. One of the new kids on the block and an upcoming textiles giant had set up a modern manufacturing unit on the outskirts of Ahmedabad : now of course, the empire is split and the two factions are into other major business ventures and fraudulent activities of various shades.

This textile unit wanted to put up a showcase treatment plant for their process effluents, in keeping with their vaunted high tech and high profile façade : I was the unwitting lamb taken to slaughter by crooks in gentlemen’s guise.

It started off in a fairly routine manner : I developed an outline design of the treatment plant for the facility.  By and by, more details and sophistication were added to the design, and also a little bit of preliminary engineering.  At their beck and call, I would catch the night train to Ahmedabad, reach early in the morning, stay in a hotel on Ashram Road ( I forget the name of the hotel), breakfast on onion uthappam at the Woodlands restaurant nearby and catch the company staff vehicle from in front of the sanitaryware store on Ashram Road.

Still a greenhorn and wet behind the ears, I fell for all the blandishments these crooks held out to me : they assured me the project had been decided in our favour, and it was just a matter of time and some more fine tuning.  And as a token of their good faith, once in a while, they would even take me to their Top Dog, who happened to be the brother of the founding father of the empire.

On one occasion, deeply etched in my memory, on an urgent call from these unreliable and uncouth louts, I air dashed to Ahmedabad by the morning flight from Bombay.  Suitable clarifications given, the discussion wound up before noon of that day.   For want of something better to do, on a whim I called up Indian Airlines to reconfirm my return flight later in the evening.  The kindly soul at the other end informed me that there was a chartered flight taking off to Bombay within the next hour, and I could make it on the flight, if I hurried to the airport.  Thus it was that I found myself amidst a group of enthusiastic and highly vocal devotees of the Swaminarayan sect who had chartered the flight   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaminarayan : I joined my new found friends in lusty singing of Bhajans all the way back on that short flight to Bombay.

The culture of an organization I suppose trickles down from the top, and seeps into the very being of the managers and other flunkeys, if they are to keep their jobs in this kind of an organization.  The same culture of devious behaviour, chicanery and skulduggery evidently cannot be removed from the genes of succeeding generations, as I have observed in later years, being a keen and critical observer of this industrial group.

This treatment plant was also one of the first where I put in a novel correction unit to control the Sodium percentage in the wastewater to less than 60 % as prescribed in the Environment Protection Rules :  Treated water would percolate through a filter bed comprising Gypsum among other support media.  This was also one of my first designs of a treatment plant in modular fashion to accommodate the major expansion plans of this overambitious group : In later years this group would grow to be one of the largest industrial conglomerates in India, by fair means or foul.

For the final round of discussions and closing the deal, I was asked to come to meet the Big Brother himself with all final drawings, specifications, details - the works.  As I ceremoniously handed over the designs to the dark complexioned fraudster, I could not help but think that his smile was more a smirk : the same inane, self satisfied smile - smirk I find in his offspring these days.

A month later, I was given the bad news that the project had been handed over to one of our competitors : their claim to fame and fortune ? This competitor also happened to be a supplier of textile machinery to the group.  And they had in their hands the perfect designs for the treatment plant, authored by an expert in the field by name Dr. A S Kodavasal.

Dr. Ananth S Kodavasal                                                                December 03, 2011

P.S :  Since that day, I have taken a vow not to touch any of this Group’s companies with a barge pole.  I only hit back at them in my own small way by selectively purchasing their “Buy one get one free” deals in their freshly opened shops.