Leading From The Front by Col. S.P. Wahi; Sterling Publishers; Price: Rs.695; 266 pp From the viewpoint of the energy security of the country, it is India’s most important company. Yet there is a curious conspiracy of silence on the failure of the public sector ONGC Ltd (formerly the Oil & Natural Gas Commission) to deliver its promise to discover and develop oil fields, and transform India into a crude oil surplus nation. This is not as fanciful as it sounds. It’s unbelievable that a country the size of India (2,973,190 sq.km) with vast alluvial plains and desert tracks as well as continental sea shelves on three sides, doesn’t have huge oil reserves underground. According to some sources, the Indian subcontinent’s onshore and offshore hydrocarbon reserves are estimated at 25 billion tonnes against the current annual consumption of 121 million tonnes of crude oil and petroleum products. Unfortunately the task of extracting these vast reserves of crude oil from the ground and funneling them into the country’s 19 refineries has been monopolised for the past half century by the public sector ONGC and OIL (Oil India Ltd). The consequence is that ever since ONGC’s dynamic chairman N.K. Prasad, plucked out of the private sector to get crude oil discovered by a Russian exploration ship Archangelisk in the continental shelf of Bombay High in 1974 out of the sea transformed it into India’s most productive crude oil reservoir, no significant oil-field discovery has been made. Typical of public sector enterprises, Prasad disappeared into oblivion and intense politicking within ONGC drove some of the most outstanding technocrats out of the corporation (including Arun Malhotra, the US-qualified member (exploration) into the World Bank, where he masterminded communist China’s highly successful oil explor-ation and commercialisation drive). Looking back on the long reign of Mrs. Gandhi, there’s no doubt that the debits on her balance sheet (bank and coal nationalisation, expansion of the public sector, declaration of Emergency etc) exceed the credits. But on the positive side, she must be credited with rising to the occasion and finding the right man for the top job in ONGC twice in a row. In June 1981, shortly after she was returned to power in New Delhi following the disastrous failure of the Janata government (1977-80), Col (Retd.) Satya Pal Wahi, an experienced and respected hand in the public sector, who after prematurely retiring from the Indian Army had acquired considerable experience of the byzantine world of India’s nationalised companies (Cement Corporation of India, Bharat Heavy Electricals, Bokaro Steel), was appointed OSD (officer on special duty) of ONGC in preparation for takeover. Once again Mrs. Gandhi’s choice proved to be fortuitous for the Indian economy. Capitalising on the discovery of crude in the Bombay High field, during his nine years at the helm of ONGC Wahi played a major role in boosting the country’s annual oil output from 9 million to 32 million tonnes per year — a huge and generally unacknowledged achievement which enabled the Indian economy to weather the…
