The Week Magazine....Business

April 23, 1997

Trash India
Toxic waste from rich countries is a
money-spinner for recycling racketeers

MRX MADE his million transporting cargo in and out of the Kandla port in Gujarat. To make more millions he decided to import hazardous waste. There were countries ready to pay for clearing their garbage, and he set up shop in the UAE, the biggest exporter of garbage to Kandla.

Thus Mr X imported the garbage he exported from Dubai and he told the authorities that he would recycle it, do 25 per cent value-addition and re-export it. Others followed suit, reducing the Kandla Free Trade Zone to a dhobi ghat when more valuable expoets o fragmented Soviet Union became a trickle.

All waste is welcom at the dhobhi ghat: lead-acid batteries, metal scrap, cables, d-ry films, floppy discs, magnetic tapes, poluthene bags and even dirty clothes. 'Orient Clipper" anchored at Kandla on January 16 with five tonnes of "old, used clothing." Kandla gives the very best opportunity for washing rich man's dirty linen. Waste recycling is the most lucrative business today in the port town of Gandhidham, a paradise of international rag pickers. The trash traders channel the muck from filthy rich lands to the UAE and then it is destination India.

The ship 'Particia Rickmers' reached Kandla on August 2 last year with 22 tonnes of "hazardous toxic material." It was followed the next week by 'Igor Ilynisky', which too openly declared that it was carrying "hazardous material". When a ship declares its cargo as "hazardous' and 'toxic' what it actually carried is left to the imagination.

All this despite the Delhi High Court's direction to the Centre four months earlier (April 10, 1996) to stop the import of toxic waste. The last consignment of lead acid battery, which the commerce ministry listed as hazardous, reached Kandla port early this year. It was brought by 'Orient Clipper", which had three containers of battery scrap weithing 65 tonnes, besides dirty linen.

HILLOCKS of empty battery cases, separators and acid remians tower inside a battery-breaking factory in the free trade zone. There is hardly any activity, a customes officer having stopped the unloading of batteries in the zone in January this year.

Acid-burnt gloves lyingstrewn on the factory floor indicate how hazardous the imports are. And how the importer has been breaking rules. "It is dangerous to handle the battery while breaking the case," says the factory watchman from Bihar. "But now only the ash remains." It is obvious that the batteries arrived without acid being drained out. A clear violation of the Basel Convention, which allows the export of only battery cases from which acid is completely emptied.

"We don't do business directly," says the factory manager Joshi thinking that he is talking to prospective buyers of the battery shells. "We have agents in Singpore and the UK. We place the order and they supply us the material. We don't have to bother about where it comes from."'

A thousand tonnes of waste lies around the two-year-old factory-mostly batery cases it is supposed to recysle! "We have not technician or machinery to recycle them," Joshi says. "We don't need them, and I don't think that they would be of any use to you." Why then did they import the batteries? The reason is simple: to take the lead electordes, for which the 'recycling technology' required is just a curde axe blow.

Though Joshi concedes that the 'empty' batteries often contain acid the customs officials insist that only drained batteries have been allowed into Kandla. The battery shells - besides the tell-tale burnt gloves - belie them. The shells have no holes which the exporter is supposed to drill as proof that acid has been drained. Anothe factory would rather sell crushed battery cases within India than recycle and export them. "We want to sell them," says the manager, "but all inquiries should be made in Mumbai, where the owner has an office," Asked for samples, a worker fetches plastic pieces-white in one hand and black in the other.

Colour segregation is the only sorting done even in large recycling units here. The consignment is merely labelled 'plastic waste' and hardly anyone checks if they contain dangerous substances before tossing them into the granule extruder. The granules later becoms sandals, carrybags and toys. Who knows whether they contain any cancer causing radioactive material.

The customs officer who played spoilsport was new to Kandla. Intrigued by the battery dumping he asked the factoryes if everything about the import was in order. They waved no-objection certificates that the Gujarat Pollution Control Board had given them at start-up time. Unsatisfied, he asked them to get a specific certificate to import and process batteries, and stopped the unloading of the batteries this January. The factory owners rushed to the board, which then wrote to the Union environment ministry for clearance. The ministry passed the buck back saying it was for the board to decide.

"If the Centre feels eveything is okay we have no objection," says Dr. G.B. Sony fo the board, pointing out that all plastic material is being reexported with lead. "We visited the units last year and our regional officers have verified tha tnothing remians here." They obviously are blind to the vast dumps of battery cases. And few officers in Kandla and andhinagar are aware of the Delhi High Court order against the imports.

The secretary of the board, J.M. Barot, has no love lost for waste importers. They should "sell vegetables if they have no other means of livelihood," he says. Yet he justifies the board's decision to give them a onetiem clearance: "We gave the clearance because they said they had remitted foreign exchange to bring it in. They have given an undertaking that they wouldn't bring in the waste in future."

The clearance, ironically, came in the wake of a Supreme Court ultimatum on February 12. It gave the environment ministry officials six weeks to prevent factories from using or dumping banned noxious substances. Or else face punitive measures, it warned the officials. But the free trade zone is a privileged place where only three items are prohibited: animal fat/oil, animal rennet and wild animals. Customs officials say that even the commerce ministry's notification of April 1995 on hazardous wastes is not binding on free trade zones.

Under the notification one needs a licence to import any hazardous waste. And official at the direcotrate-general of foreign trade (DGFT) in Delhi reveal that no licence has been issued for importing hazardous waste. As Environment Minister Prof. Saifuddin Soz said in Parliament, hazardous wastes were placed in the restricted list in April 1995. (Till then they were in the open general licence list.) Even then waste keeps coming into the free trade zone.

The customs officials say they are helpless when the pollution control board has given clearance to the factories. The factory owners make most of the loopholes in the free trade zone rules and sell a good part of the waste to buyers in India against foreign exchange. Their exports are mostly on paper. The clearing agents at Kandla says physical export of recycled waste is negligible. "The saleable items are sent to Dubai and from there to Mumbai, so that the buyer who offloads it at Mumbai has to pay only in rupees," says a clearing agent. Thus the foreign waste practically never leaves Indian shores.

"Dumping in India is in the garb of recycling. The industrial capacity hides the act of dumping. That there is no depletion in the production of zinc despite the High Court ban proves that we really don't need it," asserts environmental activist Vandana Shiva, whose Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources moved the Supreme Court agaisnt the import of hazardous wastes.

FEW WOULD have worried about hazardous waste import if the Harsh Vardhan steel company in Delhi had not appealed to the High Court against the wastes being included in the restricted list. "The court then clamped a ban on the import of toxic waste and sought clarification from the ministry," says Ravi Agarwal of Srishti, an NGO which impleaded itself in the case.

Srishti in an affidavit pointed out that the enviornment ministry had licensed only seven importers of hazardous waste. Yet 151 companies imported 65,000 tonnes of lead and zinc waste from 50 countries from 1994 to March 1996. The figures were culled from the customs' daily list of imports though Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai.

As the environment ministry noted in its affidavit that the list of imported waste often scrap and waste-with a common code for the consignment. Only by use of the code given by the DGFT are the apecific consignments identified and permitted. The importers thus would declare their cargo as 'heavy metal scrap' and get away even when the container comsists of lethal cargo. The ministry has also balmed the customes department for not providing adequate date. It feels that customs officials are not waare of the rules about hazardous waste management and handling.

The lack of coordination among the govenment agencies is evident in the Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board's action. It recently had to advertise in the newspapers asking waste importers for information on shipments! Even the process of listing and characterisation of wastes has not been done comprehensively and passed over the customes authorities to verify. Now if the customs officials are suspicious about a cargo they get the material checked at their laboratory or send it to the IITs.

With a no-objection certificate from the pollution control board the importers now can offload any cargo. This is not the case with the free trade zone only, and oil waste from the UAE is already coming in. The Aristocrat Trading Est. of the UAE, for instance, has ent 98 barrels of waste oil to Bipin Oil Agency, Mangrol Road, Keshod, Gujarat, and the oil impoters have sought permission for opening a recycling plant in the free trade zone. The Sharjah office of the exporters said over the telephone that it was ready to send any amount of any waste to India.

Mr X and other recycling racketeers at Kandla Port would rake in more millions once they outwit the lone customs officer with certificates fromt he polution control board. They have no worries about the air, water and food getting contaminated. Such worries are simply a waste of time - waste they connot pretend to recycle and profit on.

RAJESH RAMACHANDRAN
in Kandla and Delhi

There is money in honey

And the beekeeper from
Punjab has made loads of it
THERE are a couple of glasses filled with a golden-colured liquid on the table before her. When Sarparveen Kaur begins to talk about it you would think she was promoting a brand of premium Scotch. She will tell you it's worth more than that but costs much less. It is simple lemonade sweetened with one of the many exotic varieties of honey she produces. The 43-year-old queenbee of the honey business in India, along with her husband Peter Satwant Singh, owns the country's only medium-scale unit that produces honey.

Started as a joint venture promoted by the Punjab government, Honey Bee Natural Products Limited today generates a turnover of over Rs 20 crore. "Our biggest fight with the financial institutions when we started out was on the issue of six," said Sarparveen. "They saw it only as a cottage industry. We had a tough time convincing them that bees, honey and our equipment were all assets."

The husband-wife duo were smitten long before their venture got off ground. A convent-educated army officer's daughter, Sarparveen married early, luckily to a person who respected her need for an identity. peter, the only son of a big farmer near Ludhiana, was doing his Ph.D in mathematics when they tied the knot. A little later they moved to his farm and started conventional farming, growing two or three crops a season.

In 1976 they read an advertisement for a bee-keeping course-the first of its kind-at the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. Sarparveen decided to attend it purely for the heck of it. After the two-week programme, when the university asked her if it could set up a research-cum-demonstration unit at her farm, she jumped at the idea. "They threw in a big temptation," she said. "The arrangement was that at the end of three months the ten colonies (each colony has approximately 60,000 bees) of Italian honey bees would be ours,".

A fantastic offer any way one looked at it, because in those days bees were not sold in the Indian market. Slowly her interest in the little creatures grew. But when she looked around for someone to advise her on advanced beekeeping techniques she found no one in the country. The determined lady then headed for France and Germany to study beekeeping and work with commercial beekeepers. it was there that she learnt production techniques for specialised bee products.

After her return Sarparveen along with her husband set up the first private research and development unit for beekeeping, registered with the Department of Science and Technology (DST). That was in 1985. And luck continued to favour her. A few years later the Finland based Prodec (Programme for Development of Cooperatives), now Finida, was selecting a woman entrepreneur from each Asian country for a course in export marketing and management. Sarparveen was picked from India.

"Beekeeping is constructive and benefits people," aid Sarparveen, who has done everything from beekeeping to extracting honey and bottling it herself. However, the demand for honey has remained low. The only way to pay the farmers who were keeping bees was by exporting honey. The trips abroad helped her understand the market much better. She was surprised to see how popular honey was in a eastern Europe health market. Most supermarket shelves were loaded with stuff that beekeepers could produce-but they were not all honey. Many were combinations of honey and different herbs. Sarparveen tried out a similar product line with immense success. She started manufacturing beehive products like pollen proplis and royal jelly. These products were appearing in the local market for the first time. It was a gamble that paid off.

She continued to float new value-added bee products that rolled out of their modern plant at Lalru in Patiala district. "Now we have 90 proprietary products cleared by the State Ayurvedic Board. They have been developed in house," she said. Beehive products are among the natural skin and hair care products, health foods and natural medicinal products they manufacture. That is not all. The Lalru plant diversified into the manufacture of equipment used by beekeepers.

The research and extension work continues. They set up beekeeping for farmers, supply the equipment and send their staff to train farmers on site. According to Sarparveen, they undertake to do all this only if the areas is suitable in terms of flora. Every year a thousand new small farmers graduate to become beekeepers, each starting with ten colonies of Italian honey bees, just the way Sarparveen and her husband started.

Once the beekeeper has taken off, Honey Bee buys the honey, processes it and markets it in India first, then exports the surplus. What is left is converted into value-added products that are sold in north India. They also buy honey directly from farmers in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and some 6,000 farmers of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. During the honey season, normally beginning in November and ending in February, they make payments totalling Rs 4 to 5 lakh a day. For some years now they have bee the largest exporters of honey. This year they reached a new high of 2,000 tonnes.

They may be just a drop in the ocean compared to what Argentina and China export but it still is a major achievement considering that Sarparveen started off small. The gritty lady is not very worried about her share in the international market. What matters to her is quality. The buyers have been so happy with what they have received that India has come to be accepted as a source of good quality honey in the quality-conscious markets of USA and Germany. Though Honey Bee exports bulk honey, within India it markets specialty honey, under such alluring names as Orange Blossom, Leechee blossom and Mountain blossom, depending on the flora and bees have been exposed to.

"People expect the honey to have the fragrance of the fruit, but it is the flowers that lend their scent to the honey," said Sarparveen. And for the local as well as for the export market they add herbal extracts to honey to enhance the benefit of the extract. honey is known as the rasayan (purifier) in the Ayurvedic system. The Honey Bee Natural Products has kept the Ayurvedic concepts in mind while preparing its products.

Always ready to innovate and experiment, Sarparveen started the concept of health centres where people could consult an Ayurvedic doctor. A centre-dubbed the Honey Bee Rejuvenation Point-would promote the concept of treating the body from within and without using honey and other beehive products. It would also promote her products. Sarparveen launched the first such centre in Chandigarh last month.

Apart from a skin and hair treatment centre that is slated for opening next month, she has plans for setting up centres in Delhi and other metros on similar lines. The honey market scene may not be as confusing as the share market, but it can go haywire all right.

Said Sarparveen: "Two years ago there was a shortage of honey the world over. So the prices went up. That is how we got a toehold. We were also benefited by the devaluation of the rupee. Now the demand has taken off in the Indian market as well. I get a dozen inquiries a day." But Sarparveen and other honey growers are not happy with the Indian market. "Our efforts is to create awareness of the benefits of honey," she said. "That it is food like sugar or jam, and not just a medicine. But creating awareness is a slow and difficult task."

There are other advantages that bees offer. "Pollination by bees helps crops yield more, particularly in the case of oilseeds like sunflowers," said Sarparveen. That should be reason enough for farmers to start keeping bees. Also with honey picking up in popularity, they can sell honey to people like Sarparveen. For the Rs 20 lakh that the couple put in, they have done well. Today Honey Bee employs 150 staff and has recorded a turnover of Rs 7 crore this year.

Their success has benefited thousands of farmers who supply honey to Honey Bee. The details of each farmers as well as the status of the bees in the fields in all of north India pop up on her computer monitor. Honey Bee has been touring three districts in Punjab in an effort to convince farmers that beekeeping is economically worthwhile. Many farmers have enthusiastically come forward to join in producing honey and become a part of Sarparveen's success story.

Farmers get 10 colonies of bees and all the required equipment for Rs 9,250 under the project, which the Punjab government in a short span. If he multiples the colonies, he can earn much more," said Sarparveen. There are farmers who have made Rs 28,000 in the very first season. "To look after 10 colonies, you need spend only 30 minutes," said Sarparveen. "That is the beauty of bee keeping.

VIJAYA PUSHKARNA

Running on Batteries
Two entrepreneurs think this is the right time to offer
Indian consumers electric powered vehicles.

REVA MAINI's name will probably be a household word in India by next year. The battery-operated car that her husband Sudarshan Kumar Maini has named after her promises to be the first of its kind the world over. This dinky two seater, which Maini intends to put on the market next year, will be the cheapest car available, in terms of both purchase price and running cost. It will be priced at about Rs 1.75lakh net and will cost barely 25 paise a kilometre to run.

Maini's car almost sounds too good to be true. His marketing strategy is to promote it as just another household gadget : all you have to do is just plug it into an ordinary electric socket every night, and you can drive it up to 80 kilometre the next day. If you have a breakdown, just page Maini's mobile service vans and they will drive over and repair your car at once. Two adults and two children can be accommodated comfortably in this tiny car, which is barely 2.5 metre long and 1.5 metre high. The car was designed partly in India and partly in the US, keeping in mind the special needs to the Indian city-dweller, namely safety, reliability and low price.

The Reva will be a two door hatchback car made out of high impact ABS vacuum formed panels. (ABS is a new and strong plastic material that can withstand the impact resistant. The car will have a curb weight of 672 kg and a small turning radius of just 3.3 metre. There are no gears, so driving will be particularly simple. The car has a maximum speed of only 65km per hour. However, its pick-up is excellent, and it can go from 0 to 20 km in a few seconds, making it ideal for city driving and numerous traffic lights. Its compact size and small turning radius also make for easy parking.

The Reva will essentially be a city car, as it needs to be recharged every 80 km. The Maini group has conducted surveys in Indian metropolises which show the 71 per cent of car owners only use their cars within their own cities, and that they drive an average distance of 25 to 40 km a day. The typical travel pattern is small distance at frequent intervals. It also has some special features like an energy management system which informs the user when he needs to recharge his batteries. "Many electric vehicles have failed in the past because drivers did not know when to stop," says Maini. The seats have a special climate control facility whereby they are cooled or heated as required, without energy being used in heating or cooling the whole interior of the car.

"We researched all these parameters, and the needs of the Indian car user, thoroughly before we finalised the design of the Reva," says Maini, a self-made businessman from Ludhiana who heads a group with a Rs 50 crore turnover today. The idea was born out of the interaction between Maini and the American firm Amerigon, for which Maini's youngest son Chetan works. Cheta, who has been interested in cars from his childhood, won a prize for developing a car powered by solar panels along with his friends while he as an undergraduate student at the University of Michingan in the US. He worked on developing a car powered by solar panels along with his friends while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan in the US. He worked on developing an electric car while doing his master's degree in engineering from Stanford University and then joined Amerigon. Soon, Amerigon came to know that the Chetan's father's group of companies was already manufacturing and selling an intra factory premises battery operated vehicle called Chets, named after Chetan. They opened discussions with Maini on the feasibility of working together on developing an electric car.

Thus was born Maini Amerigon Cars, which is a joint venture of Maini and the $10 million American company. Maini holds 51 per cent of the shares of this company now, and will eventually reduced that to 45 per cent, while Amerigon will cut back from its 41 per cent to 35 per cent : the rest will finally go to other investors. Maini is now waiting to get the maximum concessions that he can from the Government before he starts work at his factory at Malur in Karnataka. Electric vehicles already attract only 10 per cent excise duty as against the 40 per cent of petrol and diesel vehicles. Maini hopes to get a complete excise duty cut. They are exempted from paying road tax for the first five years, and enjoy 100 per cent depreciation.

For a couple of decades now, Indian have been aware of the need to look to environment friendly technologies. Various seminars have concluded that electric vehicles are viable for the 60-80 km range of inner city travel. Attempts have been made by big companies like BHEL to venture into this area. Electric vehicles are in use in other parts of the world, but mostly for recreation or transport within a factory or university campus kind of premises. The very first electric vehicle was build in 1892. With the development of the internal combustion engine and the availability of petroleum products, electric vehicle development came to a standstill. As petroleum became scarce in the mid seventies, interest in electric vehicles grew again. however, research carried out by advanced countries in the US and Europe indicated that these vehicles would be very expensive, so interest died again. It resurfaced a decade later because of the rise in environmental consciousness and pollution problems. Now, there are over 50,000 electric vehicles in India today. Leading automobile manufacturers like Mercedes Benz, General Motors, Honda, Volvo, Ford, Peugeot, Toyota and Nissan all make them.

However, the prices of these vehicles is relatively large, compared to Maini's : Chrysler's car is reportedly priced at about $50,000 and General Motors' about $35,000. (Maini's works out to barely about $5800.) The American, French and German Governments are all now spending large amounts of money on the development, technology and propagation of electric vehicles. Maini's project is a Rs 30 crore venture. Production capacity at the Malur plant will be 6,000 cars in the first year, which will probably start production by 1997-98, and 20,000 in the following year. Booking for the car should open in the latter half of this year, once Maini has gotten whatever maximum subsidies he can wring out of the Government. The first few thousands vehicles will be sold only to residents of Bangalore so that Maini can monitor their functioning and offer immediate repair facilities.

From the second year onwards, he hopes to start exporting his cars. According to his projections, there is a market for at least 40,000 electric vehicles today, and this will grow vehicles by 2000 AD. Three prototypes of the car, made in California, are now in Bangalore. They have been subjected to severe road tests in the US and the Automobile Research Association of India at Pune. The car is still being tested for 100,000 km on Indian roads by the shaker test. "We want to be very sure of our product as we are new to the car business and have an excellent business reputation to safeguard," says Maini,whose two older sons Sandeep and Gautam help him run the companies of his group.

Maini maybe new to the business of manufacturing cars. But he is far from new to the automobile industry. His flagship company Maini Precision Products makes and exports high precision automobile components, primarily to Europe and the US: its turnover is just touching the Rs 100 million mark. Another Maini firm called Karnataka Electronics specialises in the manufacture of auto assemblies. Given Maini's past track record and nose for business, it is entirely likely that he will be able to succeed in this new and risky venture. After 15 years of working as production manager for various firms with foreign collaboration, Maini strike out on his own 24 years ago, making and supplying a small component to the German firm MICO in Bangalore, with a manufacturing unit of just 10 workers. Today, he has eight independent companies, employing over 1,400 people working in 14 production units all over Bangalore.

Revi, the two wheeler promoted by US-based Indian businessman Anil Ananthakrishna, sounds as if it is a product closely related to Reva. Actually the similarity of names is just a coincidence : these vehicles have been designed and promoted by two entirely different business groups. Anil is now seriously looking for an affluent Indian collaborator of manufacture the Revi in India. Actually, Anil has been trying unsuccessfully for years now to put his battery-powered vehicles on the roads. He began by powering ordinary bicycles with battery-operated motors in 1973, with the support of C.B. Shah, the proprietor of a local bicycle shop. His father A.K. Ananthakrishna, an ex-mayor and prominent Congress politician, gave him the use of his own car shed.

"I used to employ two young men to help me test the battery-powered bicycles everyday," he says. Finally, he developed a small battery-operated two wheelers which he named Electro-Anil. He started a small company allied Electro Anil Private Ltd. in 1982, with the patronage of several leading senior citizens like former Dewan of Gwalior M.A. Sreenivasan. This company produced and sold 500 two-wheelers the next year, mostly to foreign countries.

With that, the company got into the typical small manufacturer's financial bottleneck. Government lending institutions would not fund it as the product was too new. Anil had only the banks to fall back on, and the money they lent him was not enough to start large scale production. The Government ceiling for a small scale vehicle manufacturer at that time was 600 vehicles a year. Private investors turned him down as they thought such a low production level was not viable. It was a vicious cycle, as Anil in turn could not take the risk of registering himself as a large-scale manufacturer without any kind of financial backing.

Meanwhile, Anil had developed a huge data bank of information on the behaviour of battery-operated vehicles, and had presented innumerable papers on this subject all over the world. The Berlin Economic Development Corporation invited him to set up a plant to manufacture his vehicles. Anil continued to pursue his dream of making them in India, and even entered into dialogue with Rajiv Gandhi over getting Maruti Udyog to supply the car bodies for engines made overseas.

He designed an electric car to be made with Yugoslavian collaboration called Surya, and two models with French collaboration called Pushpak and Vayu. The idea was to get a foreign or local car body, manufacture the engine and assemble the car entirely in India and market it overseas None of his projects really materialised in India, including an attempt to get investment from the American devotees of an NRI godman. However, Surya was finally manufactured in Yugoslavia and exported to Mexico. This car could do up to 90 km an hour. Finally, Anil shifted to the US and set up a company called AAT (Alan and Anil Technology) with an American partner called Alan Rubenstein, with the sole objective of developing electric vehicles. Their first design was for a two wheeler which they called the Revi Quietrider.

They set up another company called Revi, which tied up with an American company called Tricon Industries in 1994 to assemble and produce the two-wheelers. They test marketed the vehicle extensively in recreation resorts and university campuses in the US and have just began producing it commercially there. Now they hope to introduce this two-wheeler in India shortly, and are currently looking seriously for a solid India collaborator to whom they can transfer technology and help set up an assembly line for production. "India is our largest potential market as two-wheelers are the common man's mode of transport here," says Anil. "With petrol prices going sky high and pollution becoming a serious threat in our expanding cities, we desperately need an alternative to the millions of internal combustion engine two-wheelers currently produced."

The Revi can run about 30 miles per charge and its engine is 3/4 horse-power. A meter similar to a regular fuel gauge displays the battery power. It would cost only about Rs 100 for every 1600 km, and its total operating cost sounds unbelievably tempting: just 6 paise per kilometre! The vehicles uses rechargeable sealed-lead batteries, has a curb weight of 180 pounds. All the maintenance that it calls for is a daily recharging of batteries, cleaning and lubrication of drive chain and other similar bicycle maintenance, and battery replacement after approximately 12,000 miles.

AAT also has a car, which they have named CAT-EVI (Clean Air Transport-Electric Vehicle-1), tested and ready for the assembly line. Three different models have been developed, every one of which will cost no more than Rs 28 per 100 kilometre to run. The two wheeler will be priced at about Rs 35,000 and the car at about Rs 3 lakhs on the market. The major handicap the Anil's vehicles suffer from is that they are dependent upon external battery chargers. A battery charger designed and produced by Anil, which can charge three batteries at a time, costs about Rs 3.5 lakh rupees, which is hardly the kind of additional investment that a vehicle buyer would like to indulge in. Anil suggests that individual entrepreneurs might like to invest in chargers and set up shop at regular petrol bunks or at places convenient to large groups of battery-operates vehicle user like, for example, a work spot like a factory. However, when Maini is offering a car with a built-in battery charger for a far lower price, Anil many have few takers.

Neither Maini nor Anil are the first entrepreneurs to try to manufacture battery-operated vehicles in Karnataka. Two decades ago, a state government - controlled company called Electromobiles India Ltd. attempted to assemble and market battery-powered two and three wheelers, with former cabinet secretary Zafar Saifullah as chairman and former Bharat Gold Minies Ltd. secretary M.D. Narayanan as its financial advisor. The company had Swedish collaboration and even set up a full fledged factory in Mysore. However, after a few years of sustained effort, it was unable to turn out roadworthy vehicles, and finally closed down. Was Electromobiles just too advanced a venture for its time or will Maini and Anil come to a similar end? We will probably know next year.

M D RITI in Bangalore.

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