Prologue

This is the third of an ongoing series of articles about my Foreign Service tour in India. In this article I will briefly describe my job there.

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India and Pakistan had ended one of their numerous conflicts a few months before I got there in 1972. During that war, President Nixon took the Pakistan side, and suspended US assistance to India. Simply stated, the close association between India and the Soviet Union was not exactly what the US desired of India. Needless to say, Prime Minister Gandhi was not happy about the US attitude.

Prior to its suspension, the Indian AID program was one of the largest development assistance programs the US was funding. It consisted of massive amounts of excess agricultural commodities, mainly wheat, soybean cooking oil and other such things sent to India under Public Law 480, in which the recipient opened US-owned local currency accounts (Indian rupees) and deposited the equivalent worth of the received commodities in them. The funds were to be used to fund development activities in country. When I arrived, the accounts held hundreds of millions of Indian rupees. And though the program import had been halted, the accounts kept growing due to interest accumulation. They took on a life of their own.

There were other programs that were US$ funded, to finance capital projects such as power plants and chemical plants. When I arrived, there were about $400 million worth of these prior-year projects underway. These were the ones that needed attention.

One of the sad facts of Overseas Development Assistance agencies is that the principle objective is to get the money out the door. Loan it, grant it – just do it. The annual program obligation goals had to be met, and after they were, everyone tended to lose interest. I have no reason to believe that it is not like that to this very day. Why is this sad? Because in general, projects of USAID, World Bank (IBRD and IDA), Asian Development Bank, etc. are often poorly implemented and sometime fail outright. There is a lack of lender oversight due to insufficient staff, unqualified staff, etc. Also I suspect that the agencies tend to shy away from involvement in implementation because it brings them uncomfortably close to the corrupt practices that are so common in developing countries.

So who wanted to go to India, where there was no new money for obligation? Where was the fame and glory in just building someone else’s projects? Who in the home office really cared, anyway? Answer: no one.

I had been in Thailand for 5 years, and before that, Vietnam for 6 years. Where could they send me next? “Let’s offer him New Delhi and see if he takes it…” It was March 1972

I must admit that my understanding of the political situation in India was not that complete when I arrived. It gradually dawned on me as time passed. So as my family and I struggled with the cultural adaptation we faced, the situation clarified and became integrated into the process.

It explained the large office building in the Embassy compound that was scarcely populated; that there were not many US personnel around. We had a Director, a Controller, a Legal Advisor, and a General Services Officer. I was the Chief of Capital Projects, and Chief Engineer. The rest were Indian staff. The lean organization had its benefits. The cut back had the unintended consequence of getting rid of the dead wood, with a resulting improvement in organizational performance.

There were other benefits. I had my pick of offices and chose a nice corner office with windows looking out on the grounds. My secretary was a woman (Mrs. Tara) who was a lawyer, and extremely competent. Working with her was a male typist (Mr. Rajgopal) who was a trained economist. Down the hall I had a man with a doctorate in Chemical Engineering (Dr. Alex Kapur) , and another engineer with a Masters in Civil Engineering (Mr. Y. Paul Kumar). I had several more financial professionals - accountants, economists. I was to quickly learn that it was the best professional staff I would ever have in my overseas work.

The huge bank balances of US owned local currency that had absolutely no value outside the country paid for all our operational expenses, including in country official travel, representational expenses, housing, and other billable costs of doing our work there. So I never had any static from the Controller when I asked for an airplane ticket for a business trip to Bangalore, or Calcutta, or Bombay, etc. They even paid for one in-country family trip a year to allow the family to see the country outside New Delhi.

The greatest benefit of all was that Washington left us alone. They had bigger fish to fry in other countries, and that was OK with me! New Delhi was still a fairly popular destination for the high ranking junketeers, though. I did not mind that, and most of them turned out to be good friends.

So I was the projects boss. I was on the road a lot. My job took me around to all the various project locations to inspect and monitor implementation activities. We had chemical fertilizer plants under construction in Madras, Kandla and Amedabad, Gujarat. A coal fired thermal power plant in Amedabad was being finished up. Many hospitals in various other states were being built with rupee funds. A 14-surgical suite teaching hospital in Bangalore, and other hospitals in Patna Bihar, Vrindaban, and Poona were among them. We provided architectural design contracts for ICRISAT (Indian Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropical Climates), a large facility in Hyderabad, studying farming in semi-arid agricultural areas of India.

We were participating in the big project on the Beas River in the Punjab, a dam to feed the Rajasthan Canal, and divert water into the Sutledge river by a huge tunnel aquaduct. The dam was an earth fill gravity dam with a clay core. It was a huge dirt job, requiring some 27 million cubic meters of earth. Built by the Beas Construction Board based in Talwara, Punjab. It was a fascinating project. Upstream of the main dam at Talwara was a diversion structure to feed a 10m diameter tunnel aquaduct designed to conduct excess water from the Beas into the Sutledge river about 20 km to the south. There were two tunnels, actually. The first short section fed water into a lake, that acted as a sort of balancing reservoir. Then on to the Sutledge with the 2nd tunnel terminating in a vast underground surge chamber that fed two penstocks down, down, down to the giant flip bucket that turned the discharge into the Sutledge in a magnificent plume of 200 cubic meters per second of Beas water. The Sutledge river power plant supplies New Delhi, and needed the additional water. The surge chamber was a huge cylindrical chamber leading up through solid rock to the surface of the mountain, a hundred meters or so above. If it became necessary to turn off the penstocks, the water rushing down the tunnel had to have someplace to go…the surge chamber was it. As I stood there, looking up at the large hole above. I could see the stars in the sky even though it was broad daylight outside. As I imagined that huge chamber filling up with swirling water in a few seconds, chills ran up my spine.

In addition there were completed projects that I was required to inspect. Mostly hydroelectric projects in Kerala State. Shiravadi falls is one of the highest in the world, at 1,100+ feet. We had financed and built a high-head power plant there to generate power for the Kerala grid. It was the smallest high speed water turbine I have ever seen. Most projects are low-head systems, with monstrous turbines. Imagine the energy in a head of 1,100 feet creating water pressures of almost 500 psi and running that through a water wheel (turbine) to turn an electric generator.

One of the most interesting and unique programs in USAID was the local currency loan program run in New Delhi under the authority of the Cooley Program, named after the US congressman who conceived it. Basically it used the US owned excess local currencies to fund commercial term loans to Indian businesses having at least 20% equity participation of US firms. The contribution could be in the form of $US equity contributions or US sourced goods and services. The point was they were loans between the US government and the Indian private sector entities. (All other assistance was government-to-government.) The loans were secured by the borrower with mortgages or other instruments, issued on standard commercial terms. In effect, I was running a banking operation, with $250M capitalization. It was highly successful, with barely 2% loans in default. Embassy operational funding was entirely covered by interest reflows from that program. For me, that activity right there was one of the most satisfying projects that I had in all my time with Government. And I continue to be grateful for the unique opportunity given me.

Major projects done under the Cooley Loan Program included a rubber tire plant in Goa, a Ford tractor plant in Uttar Pradesh, the Bombay Sheraton Hotel (21-storey high rise), a remodeling of the Grand Hotel in Calcutta, a fiberglass plant for thermal insulation, even a chicken farming project.

One of the best things about this assignment was that in the 3 years I was there, my job took me everywhere in the Indian subcontinent, except for the NE territories, where the Indians and the Chinese had a mini cold war going. I saw it all - from Kanukumari at the extreme southern tip of India, to Srinagar in the Kashmir north. Bangalore, Patna, Poona and Hyderabad in the interior. From Kandla, Bombay, Goa and Cochin in the far west, to Calcutta and Madras in the east much of it by rail or road transportation. The cultural experience of all that travel, to me, was priceless.

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