INDIA: Great Dream

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At Sindri, on the banks of the River Damodar, where five years ago were only mud huts in paddyfields, a new $48 million ammonium sulphate factory stood last week. It was the first big project completed by Prime Minister Nehru's government, and a source of swelling pride to India. In a land where famine is often a threat and sometimes a reality (3,000,000 people died of starvation in 1943), the development of artificial fertilizers to stimulate food crops has long been a dream of the Nehru government.

Ten thousand Indian workers (guided by 44 Americans and 40 Britons) had labored for five years without a day's loss in strikes, to build the factory. It was designed by the Chemical Construction Corp. of New York, a private American firm which had, in the words of India's Works Minister Narhar Vishnu Gadgil, rendered services "far beyond the narrow terms of the contracts." Scores of Indians had been sent to the U.S. and Britain for training, and could now run the plant with a minimum of foreign help. Capacity: 350,000 tons of fertilizer a year, enough to produce an extra 875,000 tons of food grains annually—an amount equal to the year's daily ration (12 oz.) of 7,000,000 people.

Said Prime Minister Nehru, looking over this "very impressive but very ugly iron city": "When I look upon this plant, 1 am filled with great exhilaration. I have a picture before my eyes of a new India coming into existence." He then lowered a red railroad signal and a gaily decorated locomotive chuffed away, pulling the first 14-car shipment of fertilizer.