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 OPEC crude price hikes of 1973 and 1979.

The extent of Wahi’s contribution to the post-1991 prosperity of the Indian economy which has since almost tripled from its annual Hindu rate of growth, can be gauged from the fact that immediately after Wahi’s retirement from ONGC, India’s annual production of crude oil fell from 32 million tonnes in 1989-90 to 30.35 million tonnes in 1991-92 and on April 6, 1991 ONGC informed the Union government that the target would be reduced to 28.17 million tonnes in the following year, imposing a heavy import bill on the country. Inevitably this was explained away as a reserves preservation necessity as Wahi had allegedly ‘flogged’ (over-exploited) the Bombay High field and endangered it. 
This is the backdrop against which somewhat belatedly, Wahi has written his autobiography, produced last year and reprinted recently. Leading from the Front traces his evolution from Khushab, a village without electricity west of Lahore to Benares Hindu College from where he graduated with an engineering degree, and his induction into the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun. In 1950 Wahi graduated from IMA and joined the EME (electrical and mechanical engineering corps of the Indian Army) where he served for 19 years before being posted to the Bokaro Steel Plant (1969-74) and BHEL, Hardwar (1974-78). In 1978 Wahi was transferred to the then loss-making Cement Corporation of India which he restored to profitability, before he was selected by the PESB (Public Enterprises Selection Board) for the top job in ONGC.

Although partly autobiographical, Leading From the Front is essentially a belated defence of  Wahi’s record at ONGC. In a chapter entitled ‘Bombay High Oil Field — Canards’ he fairly convincingly defends his record in ONGC against the charge that he flogged this basin which produces two-thirds of the country’s crude. In a rare instance of name-calling, he attributes the falling and since stagnant oil production in the country to the wrong choice of his successor P.K. Chandra,  excessive bureaucratisation, reduction of exploratory activity and “pawning” of high potential  oil reserves discovered by ONGC to private sector operators who have done little to get oil out of the ground ever since. According to Wahi, a large number of oil fields discovered by ONGC were gifted away to the private sector (read Ambanis, Ruias etc) “without recovering even the direct costs, let alone the sunk costs over the years on exploration activities all over the country”. And since then “not a single oil/gas strike has been made by them in the 20 virgin basins”.

Certainly Wahi has a case and legitimate grievance that the good work he did in building up ONGC into a highly productive and profitable — despite the way-below market prices paid to the corporation for its crude output — organisation has since been frittered away. The bald truth is that for the past two decades indigenous oil production in an era of rising prices has remained stagnant, and it has cost the people of the country dear.

Unfortunately, while Wahi is willing to strike, he is unwilling to wound. This memoir is full of references to malingering and corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who have gravely harmed the public interest and sentenced the nation to decades of  high energy prices, but not one of them is named. This unwillingness to unmask villains detracts from the book’s value, which is also too liberal in quoting journalists — who as is well-known, rarely research their subjects in their race to meet deadlines — to support the author’s arguments. All these infirmities in addition to an unpleasing layout and typography, and conspicuous lack of  a back-end subject index add up to make a potentially important autobiography into just another pusillanimous memoir.

Dilip Thakore