Chapter 123: Building a Talent Ladder

The Cabinet Room

June 1, 1949

The oath-taking was short. Three new ministers stood before the Governor-General’s representative in a room that smelled of fresh paint and dust, while Ram watched from the side with his hands behind his back.

"There are three changes I wish to announce," he said, when the ceremony was done, "and one enlargement."

He began with Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee. "Dr. Mookerjee, you take the Ministry of Industry. You have run a university, a Bengal government, and a political party, and you did not lose any of them. I need a man who can talk to a steelmaker in the morning and a mill hand in the afternoon and be believed by both."

Mookerjee, in his white dhoti and shawl, bowed. "I will do my best, Prime Minister."

"Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri takes Agriculture. You have no degree in the subject and no wealth. You have worked in the Uttar Pradesh districts for twenty years among the cultivators. Dr. Swaminathan and Dr. Kurien will give you the science. You will give them the village."

Shastri, a small, soft-spoken man in a plain kurta, joined his hands. "I am not worthy, but I will work."

"That is why I chose you." Ram turned. "Savarkar-ji takes the Ministry of Power, covering electricity and fuel. We have disagreed on many things, Savarkar-ji, and we will again. But no one in this Cabinet is better at insisting that a thing be done now, and the Republic is a hundred years behind on its grid. You will oversee the dams and transmission lines, and coal, petroleum, and the new Burmah holdings."

Savarkar, thin and frail in his dark coat, said in a dry voice that carried across the room, "I have waited fifty years to be asked to build something. I accept."

"And Dr. Matthai." John Matthai, tall and grey and precise, rose. "Your portfolio widens. Railways remain yours, but I ask you also to take roads, shipping, ports, and civil aviation. The Republic will have a single Ministry of Transport. A railway, a highway, a harbour, and an airfield are one system, and I will not have four ministers arguing over the same freight."

"It is a considerable burden," Matthai said, "I accept."

The Prime Minister’s study

June 3, 1949

Around the long table sat Nehru, Patel, Radhakrishnan, Mookerjee, Shastri, Matthai, Shroff, and Dr. Bhabha, down from Bangalore. At the far end sat a stocky man from Coimbatore who had not yet been introduced to most of the room, G.D. Naidu, inventor and manufacturer, whom Ram had asked to attend. Shaktidas stood behind Ram with a notepad.

"Gentlemen," Ram said. "I have asked you here to discuss a problem. I do not have the solution."

He laid a ledger on the table. "Dr. Bhabha’s people have the minds. Dr. Swaminathan’s people will have the grain. The Soviets have sent us blast furnaces, the Americans lathes, the Germans presses. They are in crates, or in half-built sheds. Mookerjee-ji, how many trained men does your Ministry say we need?"

"For the plants already approved, Prime Minister, over the next five years, eight hundred thousand skilled hands. Fitters, welders, machinists, electricians. And some forty thousand engineers. We have, at the present moment, perhaps thirty thousand of the first and four thousand of the second."

"Say it again."

"Thirty thousand against eight hundred thousand."

"Then we have a hole," Ram said. "At the top, scientists. At the bottom, peasants. In the middle, almost nothing. I want each of you to tell me what you would do."

Nehru spoke first. He had been pacing and now stopped by the window. "I will tell you what I would do, Ram, because I have been thinking about it for twenty years. I would build great institutes of technology. Not colleges, not the miserable engineering colleges the British left us, but institutions of the first rank. Where the best young minds in India, chosen by merit alone, would be trained in every branch of science and engineering by the best teachers we can find. I would model them on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or on the Zurich Polytechnic. I have visited both. I have never forgotten them."

"It would take ten years to build one such," Patel grunted.

"It would take five if we put our whole weight behind it, Vallabhbhai. And it is the finest investment this Republic can make." Nehru spread his hands. "The scientists in Bangalore will not be here forever. Who will replace them? Not the clerks the universities produce. I want a generation of Indian engineers who can design a turbine, not merely install one. Who can lead, not follow. That is what an institute of technology means."

"I agree," Radhakrishnan said. "With the principle, if not the proportions."

"Proportions?" Nehru said.

"I fear the institutes would become what the Indian Civil Service became, Jawaharlal, a caste of the clever, separated from the people they serve." Radhakrishnan took off his spectacles. "I would have them teach a student to think before they teach him to build. But I would also have them remember the factory floor."

"A fair point," Ram said. "And mine, since you have given me the opening." He turned to Nehru. "Jawaharlal, I would build your institutes. Gladly. But I will tell you what they will not do. They will not train the man who runs the lathe. They will not train the welder who joins a boiler so it does not burst. They will not train the fitter who holds a tolerance of two thousandths, the mason who builds a dam spillway, the electrician who strings a hundred miles of transmission line. A graduate of your institute will be a very fine engineer. He will not do any of those things, and he will quite rightly not wish to."

"There are workmen enough in India," Nehru said.

"There are labourers enough in India. There are not workmen. A workman is a man who has been trained, and training costs years and money and teachers. I want institutes of vocational training. A boy who has finished middle school, who can read a ruler and a drawing, may enter. Two years, mostly practical. Welding, carpentry, plumbing, machine repair, wiring, radio repair, a dozen more. They are not glamorous, Jawaharlal. They are the foundation."

"What would you call them?" Naidu asked from the end of the table. It was the first thing he had said.

"Indian Institutes of Vocational Training, IIVT, or if someone, down the line, suggests a more fitting name, then that." Ram smiled faintly.

"Then we are agreed on two," Nehru said, not unkindly. "The institutes for the engineers and the institutes for the hands."

"There is a third thing," Patel said.

They looked at him. He sat in his high-backed chair with his shawl drawn up and the inhaler on the table, and he did not move except to tap his cane on the floor.

"I have been Home Minister for two years," he said, "and I have spent most of it with maps. And I will tell you what I have learned. This country does not know itself. We do not know how much coal is under Bihar. We do not know how much copper is under Rajasthan. We do not know where the uranium is, though Bhabha insists it is somewhere in Jharkhand. We do not know the courses of our rivers, the depths of our harbours, or the heights of our passes. The British surveyed what they wished to exploit. They left the rest blank."

"The Survey of India-" Radhakrishnan began.

"The Survey of India has six hundred men, Doctor, and half are clerks. I need ten thousand surveyors, and I need them within five years. Geologists, cartographers, hydrographers, meteorologists, mineralogists, and men to read the rocks for oil. I will not fight Pakistan and plan the Republic with a map that has holes in it." Patel’s voice was low and hard. "You may build as many institutes of technology as you wish, Jawaharlal. I will build the one that tells you where to put them."

"A Survey Institute," Nehru said slowly. "Several of them."

"As many as it takes."

"Then it seems we have a ladder with the rungs not connected," Naidu said.

They looked at him again. He had stood, a stocky man with grey hair and the stained fingers of a man who had spent his life in workshops. He did not look at Ram. He looked at the table.

"Prime Minister, I am only an inventor. I make motors. I made the first Indian-made electric motor, and I made a voting machine, and I made a good many things that did not sell. But I have trained boys in my own factory for thirty years, and I will tell you what I have learned. A boy who comes into the workshop at fourteen with nothing but a good mind will be a master mechanic at twenty-five. A boy who goes to a university at eighteen will be a clerk at twenty-five.

The workshop is the better school. But the boy at the workshop cannot go to university, because he has no certificate, and the boy at the university cannot go to the workshop, because he is too proud. Your three institutions will each be a closed room."

"What would you do?" Radhakrishnan asked.

"I would join them. A polytechnic in between. A three-year course, which the best of your vocational boys can enter, and from which the best of your polytechnic boys can pass into the second year of an IIT. And I would have no door shut by origin. The ladder with the lowest rung on the ground." He looked up.

"And the Germans have a system; I have visited their factories; they call it the dual system. A student spends three days in the classroom and two in the plant, and is paid a small wage. The factory gets his labour and the first claim on his services. At the end, he has a trade and a job. It works in every tier, from the apprentice to the engineer."

"Dr. Radhakrishnan?" Ram asked.

Radhakrishnan had been writing. He looked up. "I think Mr. Naidu has described a coherent whole, Prime Minister, and I think it is better than any of us could have arrived at alone. Jawaharlal’s institutes of technology at the top. Mr. Naidu’s polytechnics in the middle. The Prime Minister’s vocational institutes at the base. Sardar Patel’s surveys running alongside, each with its own training school, entered by the polytechnic graduates. And the dual system through all of them, which ties training to employment and keeps the institutes honest."

"I have one reservation," Nehru said. "The polytechnic ladder. I fear that a bright boy from a vocational school will not, in practice, be able to compete with the sons of the educated classes. He will have no English. He will have no mathematics."

"Then we teach him," Radhakrishnan said. "The Sanskrit-medium schools begin in July. By the time the first cohort reaches the polytechnics, they will have been taught mathematics from the age of five in a language that does not require the English the educated classes already own. It levels the ground."

Nehru raised an eyebrow, but he did not argue. It was, Ram noticed, the first time he had not.

The same evening

"Locations," Matthai said, when the principle was agreed. He had been silent for an hour, taking notes in a precise hand. "How many institutes of technology, and where?"

"Nine," Nehru said at once. He had clearly thought about it. "I do not wish to be modest."

"Nine is a great many," Shroff said.

"The Republic is a great deal larger than it was a year ago, Shroff-ji."

"Then name them," Ram said.

Nehru took a pencil. "Kharagpur, for mining and metallurgy. It lies close to the coal and iron of Bengal and Bihar, and the Bengal Engineering College already exists there. Bombay, for naval architecture and petroleum, with the refinery and the docks nearby. Madras, for ship design and textile machinery. Kanpur, for aeronautics and leather chemistry, and because the foundries Ram’s people built there will supply the first graduates with a place to work. Delhi, for electronics and administration. Visakhapatnam, for shipbuilding, where the yards are going up."

"And the new territories?" Ram asked.

"Rangoon," Nehru said. "For petroleum engineering and forestry. The Burmese oil fields at Yenangyaung are the heart of our fuel policy. I would have the engineers who will rebuild them trained at the fields themselves, and I would have the Burmese see that we have brought them something other than a garrison.

Colombo, for plantation engineering and hydropower. Ceylon’s mountain rivers are among the best sites in Asia. And Port Louis, for marine engineering and sugar technology. Mauritius has the Indian Ocean on its doorstep, and the sugar industry is the one thing the island already does well."

"Nine," Ram said. "Eleven, if the polytechnics in each region are counted separately."

"Eleven too many," Shroff murmured, but he was smiling.

Mookerjee leaned forward. "Prime Minister, I would add a tenth. A mining institute at Dhanbad. Kharagpur is far from the coalfields, and a miner learns better with coal dust in his lungs."

"A tenth," Ram agreed. "At Dhanbad, in the coalfield itself."

"The vocational institutes," Naidu said. "How many?"

"One in every district that has a factory, a railway workshop, or a port," Ram said. "Perhaps two hundred in the first five years. I do not expect them to all be good. I expect the good ones to teach the bad ones."

"A hundred crore rupees," Matthai said, adding. "Over five years. It is a considerable sum."

"It is less than the price of one battle," Ram said.

Bhabha, who had been listening without a word, cleared his throat. He spoke in his quiet, precise way.

"Prime Minister, I have one difficulty. Not with the plan, but with the timing."

"Go on."

"These institutes will take time. The buildings, the laboratories, the staff. The first IIT will not admit a student before July of next year, or perhaps even later. The first graduates will not leave before 1954. The first of the vocational boys will not be ready for another eighteen months.

And in those years, the foundries are rising, the dams are rising, the plants are opening, and I tell you honestly that there will not be enough trained men to run them. The scientists in Bangalore are excellent, but there are only perhaps a thousand of us. We cannot staff the whole Republic."

"What do you propose?" Radhakrishnan asked.

"That we send our best abroad in the meantime. Now. A thousand of our finest graduates, to Cambridge, to Manchester, to Zurich, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to Tokyo, to Moscow. For three, four, five years. They return in 1953 or 1954, just as the institutes are ready to receive them as teachers. In that interval, we borrow the world’s universities."

"A scholarship scheme," Nehru said slowly. "I like it."

"I like it too," Shroff said. "But I must raise the cost. A thousand students, five years each, at an average of three thousand dollars a year, is fifteen million dollars. It is a sum we have, but not a sum we should spend lightly."

"And what do we do," Patel said, from his chair, "when they do not come back?"

The room was silent.

"I do not say it to be cynical," Patel said. "I say it because I have seen it. A boy goes to Cambridge, falls in love with an English girl, is offered a position at a laboratory with a salary ten times what we shall pay him. Why should he return to a country that has no laboratory, no salary, and a Prime Minister who asks him to sacrifice?"

"Some will not," Nehru said. "That is the price of an open world."

"It is a price I am not willing to pay for a thousand," Patel said. "We lose a hundred, we have wasted fifteen lakhs a head."

"A bond," Shroff said. "A contract. The scholar signs before he leaves. If he does not return within a year of finishing, he repays the scholarship with interest. The family is the guarantor."

"That keeps the poorest out," Radhakrishnan said. "Only the sons of the rich could stand surety."

"Then the state stands surety," Ram said. "For those who cannot. But Sardar-ji’s concern is real, and I do not think a bond alone will answer it. A man does not return because he is forced to. He returns because there is something to return to."

"Meaning?" Nehru asked.

"Meaning that every scholar who returns will be guaranteed a post, a salary at a defined scale, the highest in the public service outside the Cabinet, and a laboratory built for him before he arrives. Dr. Bhabha, Dr. Sarabhai, Dr. Tank have shown us what happens when a man is given the tools. The returning scholar will not be a clerk in a government department. He will be a man who has been asked to build something."

"A promise the Republic must keep," Patel said grimly.

"A promise the Republic will keep."

"And those who stay?" Nehru asked.

"Will stay," Ram said. "I will not chase them. Some will succeed in a foreign country and send money home. Some will teach foreign students. Some will become distinguished, and India will be proud of them. But I would rather lose a hundred than build a wall. The ones who return will come back because they want to, and a man who comes back because he wants to is worth ten who came because they had to."

Nehru was smiling, a small, tired smile. "I would add one thing. The scholarships should not be restricted to the sons of the universities. Let the polytechnic’s best and the vocational school’s best apply as well, once they are ready. If we are to build a ladder, the ladder should reach all the way up to Cambridge."

"Agreed," Ram said. He looked at Naidu. "Dr. Naidu. You will chair the commission that designs all of this. You have six months."

Naidu had been standing for a long time, saying nothing. Now his stocky frame seemed to straighten. "Prime Minister, I came to Delhi expecting to be asked to sit on a committee. I find I am being asked to build a country’s workforce. I will need an office, a staff, and a very long list of requests."

"The Home Minister has told me that no request of yours will be refused without his personal reading," Ram said. "Give Shaktidas your first list tomorrow."

Patel, in his chair, made a sound that might have been a laugh.

The Chenab front

June 4-6, 1949

By the first week of June, the Indian line had moved forty miles beyond Gujranwala, and the Pakistanis had turned and made a stand at the Chenab.

It was the second hardest fight of the war. The river at Wazirabad ran two hundred yards wide, swollen with snowmelt from the Himalayas, and the Pakistani 8th and 15th Divisions held the far bank in depth, with a hundred and fifty guns and the new British shells arriving each night by rail. The Indian engineers began bridging on the third. By the fourth, they had lost two pontoon bridges and eighteen men.

On the night of the fifth, Cariappa, standing in a ruined sugar mill on the near bank with a map spread before him, made a decision that surprised his staff. He did not throw his armour across. He sent a single brigade of infantry, in assault boats, upstream at night, to a bend where the Pakistani line was thin, and held every gun he had silent until the first boats grounded on the far shore. Then he opened fire along the whole front.

The brigade held its bridgehead for eleven hours against three counter-attacks. The 5th Gorkhas, in the centre, fought their way up a tamarisk-covered bank with kukris and bayonets when their ammunition ran out. By dawn on the sixth, the engineers had a Bailey bridge over, and the 1st Armoured Division began to cross.

Twenty miles downstream, a group of Pakistani irregulars, local villagers armed with rifles and sticks, blew a canal embankment and flooded a field in front of a column of Indian vehicles. It delayed them for nine hours. When the Indians finally reached the village, they found it empty save for a single old man sitting under a tree.

"Where are the others?" the Indian captain asked.

"Fled."

"Why?"

"You will burn us," the old man said.

"We will not."

"Everyone says you will." He looked up at the officer, and his face was lined and tired. "Will you?"

"I give you my word."

"I have heard words," the old man said. But he stood, slowly, and led the captain to the well, and showed him where the villagers had hidden their grain.

The Prime Minister’s study

June 6, 1949

The telephone rang at ten at night. Ram picked it up. It was Cariappa, calling from the Chenab, and he did not waste words.

"The bridgehead is secure, Prime Minister. We will cross the main force tomorrow. But I must tell you, sir, the Pakistanis are not breaking. Their morale is higher than it was a month ago. Jinnah’s death has done something to them. I do not understand it, but I see it in the prisoners."

"A martyr is more useful than a statesman."

"They are fighting for him now. I do not think it will end soon."

"How long?"

"A month. Perhaps two. Lahore will fall within three weeks. After that, the Jhelum. And the hill country beyond is a different problem." A pause. "Sir, may I speak plainly?"

"Please."

"I have been a soldier for thirty years. I have never seen a country this determined to die."

"Nor have I, General," Ram said. "But we will not make it easy for them to do so."

He put down the telephone and sat in silence. On the desk before him lay the map, with the faint pencil line running from Lahore to Rawalpindi to Peshawar to Quetta and, beyond, into the white blank of the Hindu Kush. He picked up the pencil and, after a moment, put it down without drawing anything.

Aurangzeb Road

That night

Patel sat in the high-backed chair by the window with the rug over his knees and the eucalyptus inhaler on the small table beside him. The wireless played softly, a dispatch from the Chenab. On the other side of the room, the physician, who passed as a private secretary, sat with a book open and an eye on the clock.

A car stopped outside, and a minute later Ram came in alone.

"You should be asleep," Patel said without turning.

"So should you."

"Dr. Roy has given me until ten. I am eleven minutes under." Patel looked up. In the lamplight, his face was gaunter than it had been three weeks earlier, and no worse. "He examined me again on Tuesday. The shadow has not grown."

"That is good."

"It is nothing. It has not grown yet." But there was a flicker in his eyes. "He also says I have gained a pound. Six weeks of his dal. I tell you, Ram, if the Pakistanis knew what it took to hold Delhi’s Home Minister to a diet, they would surrender at once."

Ram sat down in the chair opposite. For some time, neither spoke. The wireless murmured: the 5th Gorkhas had held a bridgehead at Wazirabad.

"Jinnah is dead," Patel said at last.

"Yes."

"I never liked the man. I never thought him a villain, either. He wanted something and went on wanting it past all reason, and it cost a million lives." Patel’s voice was tired. "I find I have nothing to say over his grave."

"You are a better man than I."

"And the war?"

"Will be long. The coast is ours, and Baluchistan is rising. Karachi will hold for weeks. Cariappa tells me the Punjab will be quiet until he has the aircraft free to take Nankana Sahib."

"And then?"

"And then Karachi falls, and Pakistan is a country with no sea, no capital port, and a hundred million people on land that cannot feed them." Ram looked at the lamplit road. "I wonder what it will do, Sardar-ji. Whether it will sue for terms, or break apart, or go on."

"And what do we want it to do?"

"You know my views, Sardar-ji. They have not changed since that evening in Naini"

The clock in the corridor struck ten. The physician looked up from his book, Patel sighed, drew the rug to his chin, and shut his eyes.

"I will go to bed," he said, "since the Republic requires it of me."

Ram rose. At the door he paused, looking back at the old man in the chair, who already seemed asleep. Then he went out softly into the warm dark, and the wireless behind him went on murmuring of the war.

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