WARTIME Industrial India
Fender, radiator, radiator grill, and headlight assembled unit being mounted on the chassis from an overhead conveyor at a General Motors plant in India
NDIA'S 350,000,000 persons are predominantly agricultural, deriving support from seasonal crops such as rice, tea, and coffee, or from the harvesting of timber, rubber, and other crops of the land. Now that the tide of war has practically severed this continent from certain and effective aid from England and the United States, India must look to herself for manufactured goods. Although 70 per cent of the people have been farmers and dependent upon exchange of materials between nations, war expediency has founded and expanded heavy manufacturing industries. Chemical industries are producing necessary materials never before made on that continent and new drug companies are not only processing, for domestic consumption, the drugs and herbs indigenous t o India but successfully synthesizing modern pharmaceuticals. Heavy machine industries were already well founded before the war began and used to good advantage the traditional patience and skill of the native. Progress of the newborn heavy chemical industry has been good. Plants to produce soda ash, synthetic ammo-
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At India's Central Research Institute. Top. Taking stock of collection of living cultures. Center above. Cholera vaccine has been tested and passed for dispatch. Center below. Antivenin being injected into the vein of a child bitten by a Russell's viper. Child's father holds the dead snake. Where the identity of the type of snake is established, records show over 90 per cent recovery among those bitten. Bottom. C. R. I. library, open to all the medical workers in India, contains a highly specialized collection of books in many languages.
Anemometers, for registering wind velocity, are tested and repaired at Poona Institute. The Poona meteorological office administers seven main and 3 0 0 surface observatories.
nia, caustic soda, chlorine bleaching powder, and bichromates were all started when wartime transportation difficulties began to squeeze the country's imports. Plants to manufacture stabilized bleaching powder, soda ash, heavy chemicals, and sulfuric acid were erected. Sulfuric acid is manufactured at various places. Only one establishment uses pyrites for sulfuric acid production. Investigations of the Geological Survey of India have revealed large deposits of high-grade rock sulfur. Never a heavy importer of acetic acid, India now augments her supply by a small factory which turns out fairly large quantities annually from acetate of lime from a near-by source. A Bengal company is said to be producing other quantities of this acid. Other organic acids, such as tartaric, citric, and oxalic, are imported to a major degree, but it was reported before the outbreak of the Pacific war that a firm was beginning their manufacture. Soda ash, chlorine, caustic soda, and bleaching powder are made in fairly large quantities. Ammonium sulfate is produced to a limited extent as a by-product of coking operations. Synthetic ammonia is also made for nitric acid and explosives. Later this will be the base for creating a fertilizer industry. Demand for khaki-dyed cloth, plus India's large supply of chromite ores, have facilitated creation of a bichromate industry. The gap between demand and local supply has, heretofore, been filled by imports from the United Kingdom and the United States. Even with the contemplated expansion of all India's bichromate productive facilities to meet the present extraordinarily heavy demand, authorities in India say that a thorough
overhaul of manufacturing processes and techniques will be necessary if the industry is to meet competition successfully and survive in a postwar world. Methyl alcohol, acetone, and calcium have been produced by wood distillation as by-products of the manufacture of charcoal for iron and steel industries. Acetone is made in ordnance factories from acetate of lime. Some of the most promising advances toward Indian independence have come in the field of drugs and pharmaceuticals. More than 290 drugs and many other items of medical supply formerly imported are being manufactured by home industries. The surgical instrument industry has been fully mobilized, and India is supplying 85 per cent of its own needs in this field. Serums for treatment of tetanus, diphtheria, and anthrax are made. A cod liver oil substitute, oil from the livers of sharks caught in Indian waters, has entered large-scale manufacture. The government has purchased a large amount of this material. The Central Research Institute is one of the most important factors in India's fight for health. It is known throughout the world for its research on the major epidemic and endemic diseases which ravage the native population. Production of anticholera vaccine is calculated in millions of doses annually, and the institute is staffed for the production A t the Central Research Institute. Top. Colonel Webster, director of the Kasauli Pasteur Institute before the decentralization of antirabic treatment and now senior assistant director of the Central Research Institute in charge of the production of serum and vaccine. Center. Sealing ampoules with a blow pipe. A l l ampoules used by the C. R. I. are now manufactured in India. Bottom. Scrutinizing a rolled bottle of the cholera culture for vaccine.
of 200,000 doses a week. The C. R. I. also carries on the antirabic treatments, formerly under the guidance of the Kasauli Pasteur Institute, and i s producing serum for the treatment of 20,000 cases of dog bite yearly. A speciality is the production of snake bite antivenin, the venom being supplied by a sister institute. The C. R. I. manufactures a serum which is bivalent for the treatment of cobra or the Russell's viper bites. These two snakes are responsible for the largest number of deaths from snake bites throughout India. Anesthetic ether output is 10,000 pounds a month, a new factory for galenicals is under construction, and dried blood plasma operations are being started. Emetine hydrochloride, required for treatment of amoebic dysentery, is obtained from ipecacuanha which grows wild in the forests of South America. It has been proved that it grows well in Mungpoo, Bengal, and cultivation is under way. Acriflavine, a disinfectant, is also made. To prevent scurvy i n soldiers, vitamin C is usually included in the diet of the army. India makes a concentrated vitamin C by drying amli berries, collected in Nilgris, and pressing them into tablets of suitable form. Amla berries are the most concentrated form of vitamin C that India has. To utilize imported Tibetian borax, a small-scale plant for production of boric acid has been started. Rubber goods, such a s waterproof sheeting, hot-water bottles, and air cushions, are being made at various companies throughout the nation. The needs of the Medical Stores Department for rubber goods such as these has caused one firm to expand and erect two extra mills to meet the increased demand. Government ordnance factories have been working at high pressure for some time. Before the war total employment in ordnance was 17,000. Today the number is over 50,000 and still rising. Plans under way call for a greater expansion amounting to 20 per cent and t h e provision of new plant and machinery which would enable the manufacture of the more modern types of armament including guns, car-
Production of armored carriers from Indian steel in a railway workshop somewhere in India. Top. Riveting in progress on assembly line. Steel for bulletproof rivets was supplied by an Indian steel company. Center. Armor plates being assembled on the erection jig prior to welding and riveting. Below. The finished armored carrier. Right.
A t General Motors in India, mounting truck wheels with electric nut runner.
riages, and ammunition, aircraft bombs, light machine guns, and loose liners for the 3.7-inch antiaircraft guns. Small arms ammunition is manufactured to R. A. F . specifications in India, and a plant for high explosives is being installed. T o provide raw materials for explosives manufacture, facilities for production of benzene and toluene were greatly ex tended. For the manufacture of high-grade steels, existing plants were expanded and modernized. Similar extensions are being carried out in ordnance factories producing guns, gun carriages, finished shells, fuses, and miscellaneous components. When complete, these expansions will enable India to produce, in addition to guns al ready being manufactured, certain field guns of the most modern type, to maintain the latest types of antiaircraft guns, and t o supply these weapons with ammunition.
The Harlow, the first plane assembled in India, was designed in America
The Search for Unity RAYMOND B. FOSDICK President, Rockefeller Foundation, N e w Y o r k , Ν . Υ .
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F WE are to have a durable peace after the war, if out of the wreckage of the present a new kind of cooperative life is to be built on a global scale, the part that science and advancing knowledge will play must n o t be overlooked. For although wars and economic rivalries m a y for longer or shorter periods isolate nations and split them u p into separate units, the process is never complete because the intellectual life of t h e world, as far as science and learning are concerned, is definitely internationalized, and whether we wish it or not an indelible pattern of unity has been woven into the society of mankind. There is not an area of activity in which this cannot be illustrated. An American soldier wounded on a battlefield in the Far East owes his life to the Japanese scientist, Kitasato, who isolated the bacillus of tetanus. A Russian soldier saved b y a blood transfusion is indebted to Landsteiner, a n Austrian. A German soldier is shielded from typhoid fever with the help of a Russian, Metchnikoff. A D u t c h marine in the East Indies is pro tected from malaria because of the experi ments of an Italian, Grassi; while a British aviator in North Africa escapes death from surgical infection because a Frenchman, Pasteur, and a German, Koch, elaborated a new technique. In peace as in war w e are all of us the beneficiaries of contributions to knowledge made b y every nation in the world. Our children are guarded from diphtheria by what a Japanese and a German did; they are protected from smallpox b y an Eng-
lishman's work; they are saved from rabies because of a Frenchman; they are cured of pellagra through the researches of an Austrian. From birth to death they are surrounded by an invisible host—the spirits of men who never thought in terms of flags or boundary lines and who never served a lesser loyalty than the welfare of mankind. T h e best that every individual or group has produced anywhere in the world has always been available to serve the race of men, regardless of nation or color. What is true of the medical sciences is true of the other sciences. Whether it is mathematics or chemistry, whether it is bridges or automobiles or a n e w device for making cotton cloth or a cyclotron for studying atomic structure, ideas cannot be hedged in behind geographical barriers. Thought cannot be nationalized. T h e fundamental unity of civilization is the unity of its intellectual life. There is a real sense, therefore, in which the things that divide us are trivial a s compared with the things that unite us. The foundations of a cooperative world have already been laid. I t is n o t as if we were starting from the beginning. For at least three hundred years the process has been at work, until today the cornerstones of society are the common interests that relate t o the welfare of all m e n every where. In brief, the age of distinct human societies, indifferent to the fate of one another, has passed forever; and the great task that will confront us after the war is to develop for the community of nations new areas and techniques of cooperative
1 Reprinted from. "The Rockefeller Foundation. A Review for 1941", President Fosdick's Report.
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action which will fit the facts of our twentieth century interdependence. We need rallying points of unity, centers around which men of differing cultures and faiths can combine, denned fields of need or goals of effort in which by pooling its brains and resources the human race can add to its own well-being. Only as we begin to build, brick by brick, in these areas of common interest where coopera tion is possible and the results are of benefit to all, can we erect the ultimate structure of a united society. A score of inviting areas for this kind of cooperation deserve exploration. Means must be found by which the potential abundance of the world can be translated into a more equitable standard of living. Minimum standards of food, clothing, and shelter should be established. The new science of nutrition, slowly coming to maturity, should be expanded o n a worldwide scale. The science of agriculture needs development, n o t only in our own climate but particularly in the tropic and sub tropic zones. With all their brilliant achievements the medical sciences are in their infancy. Public health stands at the threshold of new possibilities. Phys ics and chemistry have scarcely started their contributions to the happiness and comfort of human living. Economics and political science are only now be ginning to tell us in more confident tones how to make this world a home to live in instead of a place to fight and freeze and starve in. All these matters await the future peace. Nevertheless they constitute the stern realities of the present, for as Vice-Presi dent Wallace has said: "From the prac tical standpoint of putting first things first, at a time when there are not enough hours in a day and every minute counts, planning for the future peace must of necessity be a part of our all-out war program." 729
