CRISIS IN POWER EQUIPMENT INDUSTRY 19 power. A global tender has been floated. Foreigners will come and tell us that to transmit this power we need to import lock, stock and barrel a 765 KV, or a 1050 KV A C system or a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) system since no Indian manufacturer make this equipment or has a collaboration for it. Most likely, the foreign experts would perfer the HVDC system since several European multinationals have joined together to form a 50 Cycle group and researched the HVDC system only to find that there was no demand for it in Europe. Some idea of the costs can be had from the fact that if 4,000 MW are to be transferred South and 8,000 MW towards the West, the costs of the three alternatives would be: i) A. C. All 765 KV lines—Rs. 8,914 crores ii) A. C. All 1050 KV lines—Rs. 10,011 crores iii) High Voltage D. C. system—Rs. 9,321 crores Having put the cart before the horse we shall then look for soft credits to further mortgage this nation! Complaints against BHEL All this of course does not detract from the fact that many of the complaints against BHEL made by its customers are quite legitimate. BHEL was established primarily for the Indian market and to serve the Indian people. But the Indian customer is a second class citizen. If a Libyan machine or a New Zealand machine is under manufacture, everybody from the chairman to the unskilled worker is put on the job. Special cells are set up, effective monitoring is done. And to the site everybody who is anybody goes for inspection; that includes even persons holding posts like Chief of Security or Director of Personnel etc. There is of course nothing to complain about in all this, but the point is that all this is done for the export order, and never for the Indian customer. There is no doubt considerable merit in the complaints of the state electricity boards. Another legitimate complaint is poor quality. Quality is too complex a question. Can one really expect Indian companies which work on imported technology and materials to ensure quality? For example, BHEL imports, as stated earlier, 67 per cent of its consumption. Can quality be ensured when there is no in situ inspecton and when there is a pressure at the works to allow deviations and concessions to meet delivery schedules? Then we come to technology. This is imported wholesale and repeatedly. In fact, there is a premium on technology imports. It is not possible to ensure the optimality of design in a technologically complex machine when the design is made to German, British or Japanese standards and design criteria. After all technology is location specific. We are not talking about the first law of thermodynamics in its universal application; we are talking about specific situations and applications. The consequence is that the indigenous technological capability does not exist and we get