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Cash worth well over ̀ 1,000 crore changes hands at petrol pumps in India every day. This is what makes the filling stations and their staff easy targets for criminals. But now, by beginning to use the services of cash logistics firms, petrol pumps have started securing their cash and men.
On average, one petrol pump is targeted by criminals every six hours in India, said Ajay Bansal, chief of the All India Petroleum Dealers’ Association, highlight-ing the point that handling cash by dealers is a big challenge. “Everyone is averse to cash; it’s a big headache.” This has driven Bansal to buy the services of AGS Transact Technologies, a cash logistics firm that manages bank ATMs as well as provides technological solutions to fuel stations.
Bansal’s filling station at Mayur Vihar in New Delhi now has an ATM-type machine that accepts cash obtained from customers,
rejects fake or spoilt currency notes, and can throw up transaction slips whenever sought. The machine is linked to AGS’ net-work and can tell the service provider as well as the dealer the cash balance at any point in time.
Just in case criminals take away the ma-chine, as they have done with ATMs at times in the past, both parties would know the amount of cash lost and AGS will have to compensate the dealer the entire amount within 10 days, said Bansal. For this, AGS has a contract with insurance providers at the backend. Its armed men show up at least twice a day to transfer cash from filling stations.
AGS charges ̀ 30,000 a month for the serv-ice, Bansal said, adding that the fee is too high for many petrol pumps with low sales.
India has about 53,000 petrol pumps, with 95% of them controlled by state-run Indian Oil Corp, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum, and the balance shared by Reliance Industries, Essar Oil and Shell. A proliferation of petrol pumps in a decade has left many pumps, especial-ly the new ones, with lower income. The average volume of petrol and diesel sold from a retail outlet has fallen to 160 kiloli-tres a month from 200 KL. More than 80% of transactions are done in cash.
At present, only about a dozen petrol pumps have signed up with AGS. A few more in Mumbai will join in a month. Bansal said the association is negotiating with cash logistics firms to bring the rates down. “At ̀ 10,000 a month, it will be afford-able to many more pumps,” he said.
The service will get more sophisticated in the second phase, Bansal said, when the machine installed at the retail outlets will get linked to the dealers’ bank account. Then the cash accepted by the machine will immediately reflect in the dealer’s ac-count. In the third phase, he said, the plan is to get banks to install ATMs at fuel out-lets so that the cash collected there is im-mediately absorbed by the banks, obviat-ing the need for a risk-fraught transfer of cash from stations to bank branches.
Vikram Doctor & Writankar Mukherjee
Food bans seem to be a theme for 2015. Some are sweeping like Maharashtra’s beef ban or the nationwide ban on Maggi, some specific like
Madhya Pradesh’s ban on eggs in mid-day meal schemes and some local like the housing society in Mumbai alleged to be boycotting a family over cooking meat. Everywhere it seems people are stopping others from eating something.
It rarely comes out well. Banning some-thing so basic makes people resentful, de-fiantly pushing them to eat what they might have avoided voluntarily. Bans tend to lack practical logic — they are imposed precisely because what they require isn’t what people would do normally. But since their perpetrators never admit to the prejudices underlying most bans, they invent twisted justifications that can be as damaging as the ban.
50 years ago, a particularly startling ban was imposed, and had lasting conse-quences. Bans are rarely imposed on popular foods, especially those seen as emblematic of a community. And few foods are more emblematic of Bengal than sweets based on channa (split milk solids) like sandesh and rosogollas. Yet on August 23, 1965 such milk sweets were banned in Calcutta under the West Bengal Channa Sweets Control Order imposed by Congress chief minister Prafulla Chandra Sen.
Sen justified his action by pointing to the dire situation of dairying in the state. In a speech in Bengali on All India Radio (AIR), he noted: “Whereas the daily per capita of supply of milk in the Punjab is 17 ounces and in Bihar 4 ounces, in West Bengal it is even less than 3 ounces per capita.” Despite Bengal’s historical repu-tation as a land of milk and honey, it has always lagged in milk production in re-cent times. Across the border in Bangladesh shortages are still so bad that chaiwallahs use milk substitutes made of imported palm oil and milk powder.
Imported milk powder was important in West Bengal then too, but as Sen noted, India’s deteriorating financial situation — the rupee would be devalued in 1966 — made imports increasingly costly. Sen wanted, rightly, the scarce milk to go first to children and mothers, but solutions like taxing channa or offering subsidised milk to the most needy could have been tried. Instead, he went straight for a ban on channa in Calcutta and neighbouring areas, with the possibility of extending it state wide.
Sen was an upright, committed man who the current CM Mamata Banerjee, in her memoirs, claims as her mentor, though she is too politically savvy to try a ban on Bengali sweets. Sen had been a freedom fighter and then minister of food in the first government of independent Bengal right until he took over as CM. And as Joya Chatterji points out in her book Spoils of Partition: Bengal & India 1947-1967, he had the vivid experience of the disastrous Bengal famine, when the previous Muslim League government had tried and failed to impose controls on food movements.Yet, faced with two years of failed monsoons and rising prices, Sen panicked and imposed a wide range of controls from curbs on grain trade to re-strictions on wedding feasts. “These measures had not worked in in 1943; in the
crisis on 1966, they were as ineffectual as they had been during the famine,” writes Chatterji. Powerful traders hoarded or smuggled food to Bihar or East Pakistan while the burden was felt by “traders in foodstuffs, ration shop licensees, rice millers and transporters on whose sup-port the Congress regime in West Bengal had increasingly come to depend.” Sen’s policies destroyed his party’s base.
Sen had not counted the effects, both psy-chological and practical, of the sweets ban. He was an austere Gandhian who possibly saw sweets as inessential luxu-ries. But for ordinary people, small things like sweets helped ease the problems of daily life and their absence symbolised the failure of the state. Mani Shankar Mukherjee, the popular Bengali novelist who writes as Sankar, says that the ban went against the mood and culture of Bengali people: “The measures may have had merit but the costs of implementation were huge — thousands of people lost out, several sweet businesses had to be shut down and people still consumed milk sweets in the black market whose price was exorbitantly high.”
For those in the industry, it was a dark time. “The backbone of Bengal’s sweet industry was broken then,” says Dhiman Das, executive director at the legendary firm KC Das, which claims its founder Nobin Chandra Das invented rosogolla in 1868. Dhiman Das is the fifth generation of the family and he recalls, “We had to sell ornaments of our family and took loans from bank to survive.” As with oth-
er famous shops, like Balaram Mullick & Radharaman Mullick, Bhim Chandra Nag and Sen Mahasay, KC Das had to close outlets across the city, leaving only their main branch at Esplanade, which sur-vived by selling other snacks.
Sen encouraged this. “We should bear in mind that all these sweetmeat shops pre-pare salted variety of edibles, such as nimki, singhara, radhaballavi, luchi dal-puri, kachuri, jhuribhaja, alurdom, curry, dal, etc,” he said in that AIR speech. And he promised extra supplies of sugar and flour to make non-milk sweets. This, he felt, countered the charge that 39,000 em-ployees across 8,000 shops were facing re-trenchment.
But as Sudip Mullick, proprietor of Balaram Mullick & Radharaman Mullick, a fourth generation member of the founder family, points out, for shops to suddenly shift from their core focus was not easy. “Our entire family, including my grandmother and father, had to literally jump into the action to come up with new sweets based on besan, ma-ida, kaju and other materials since our artisans only knew how to make rosogolla and sandesh, which are all milk products,” he says.
Some sweet shops took more di-
Petrol Pumps Buy Some Cash Insurance
On average, one petrol pump is targeted by criminals every six hours in India says the chief of the All India Petroleum Dealers’ Association. India has about 53,000 petrol pumps
Faced with two failed monsoons & rising prices, Sen imposed controls ranging from curbs on grain trade to restrictions on wedding feasts
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Filling stations are installing ATM-like machines that will reduce the risks from holding huge amount of cash
Self-Driving Cars: Parts Makers Keep Pace
The race to build self-driving cars maybe in the last lap with top carmakers and tech majors including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and Volvo testing driverless vehicles across the world. And top auto parts suppli-ers, too, are strengthening their technology prowess to meet the demand for specialised systems these vehicles would need.
World’s largest auto component maker Robert Bosch expects rap-id growth of automated driving assistance systems to generate €1 billion, or $1.1 billion (about `7,000 crore), in its annual sales by 2016.
ZF Friedrichshafen, another German auto component major, recently took journalists from across the world to Berlin to showcase its preparedness for the rapid technological advanc-es and trends in the automotive industry, including autonomous and automated driving, and im-proved efficiency and safety.
Clubbing a number of technolo-gies and features that will be part of automated vehicles, ZF show-cased a prototype of ‘Advanced Urban Vehicle’, which has an in-novative front axle concept and electric motors mounted close to the wheel semi-automated assist-ance functions.
The car can drive without any driver sitting inside, with cell hone or smart watch acting as the remote. It also showcases Smart Parking Assist manoeuvres with multifunction steering wheel with hands-on detection (HOD) and organic light-emitting di-ode (OLED) display. It can locate vacant space and park without a driver.
The front axle is also innova-tive, with steering angles of up to 75 degrees, enormously increas-ing the agility and manoeuvra-
bility of the pro-totype.
The all-electric rear-axle drive e T B ( e le c t r ic Twist Beam) is mounted close t o t he whe el , which enables the basic layout of the vehicle to be redesigned.
When required, for example, the system reduces the drive torque in good time before entering the bend and thus reduces the speed without any mechanical brak-ing.
The driver is also in direct con-tact with the Advanced Urban Vehicle via the steering wheel: the hands-on detection function covers the entire steering wheel and thus forms the basis for as-sistance and automated driving functions.
“This study marks, to a certain extent, a starting point from which concepts for future urban mobility can be derived very spe-cifically with regard to the new competency areas opening up for ZF, thanks to the acquisition of TRW,” said Dr Stefan Sommer, chief executive officer at ZF Friedrichshafen.
ZF recently concluded acquisi-tion of US auto parts major TRW Automotive to emerge the third-largest auto part maker in the world after Robert Bosch and Denso Corporation, with joint revenues of over €30 billion in 2014.
“With the integration of TRW, ZF is making inroads into new product segments and can extend its portfolio as a multinational systems supplier in driveline and chassis technology to in-clude active and passive safety systems,” Sommer said. “The added locations provide us with new synergies locally and glo-bally from which our customers worldwide benefit: from develop-ment, materials management, production and sales through to the aftermarket business,” he said.
The company has also started production of S-Cam3 for the first time for various vehicle segments worldwide. It claims that the camera system offers six times the processing power of its previous generation.
This correspondent was in Berlin on the invitation of ZF
Friedrichshafen
A ZF proto-type can drive without any driver sitting inside, with a cellphone or smart watch acting as the remote
Robert Bosch expects automated systems to generate €1 billion in its annual sales by 2016
rect action and challenged the channa control order in the Calcutta High Court, which duly struck it down on November 16, 1965. Enraged, Sen passed the even more sweeping West Bengal Milk Products Control Order just two days lat-er. This was also immediately challenged in court, and it was on November 25, while the verdict was being deliberated that Sen delivered his speech on AIR where, in ad-dition to explaining why the measure was needed and what relief could be given, he also let his emotions get the better of him. In the current situation, he said, making food with milk in West Bengal was tanta-mount to a crime, and those resisting the order were acting against public interest.
Today, when politicians froth at each other on night time TV and make extreme statements as a matter of course, this might not seem shocking. But at that time, and perhaps also reflecting the general irritation that Sen’s bans had caused, his statements became a matter for a court case. Justice BN Banerjee of the Calcutta High Court delivered a lengthy opinion in March 1966 on whether Sen had commit-ted contempt of court by delivering such statements while the second order was be-ing decided by the court.
And in a narrow decision — after many pages looking in disfavour at the govern-ment’s conduct — Justice Banerjee de-cided that there was contempt, but he al-lowed “the contemnor did not ‘anticipate’ his speech might be contumacious or might tend to become one,” and let the government off with a warning. This up-set Sen so much that he appealed to the Supreme Court, where he had no luck ei-ther. In 1968, in a verdict still cited in con-tempt of court cases, Justices J Shah, V Ramaswamy and A Grover ruled that “the speech was ex facie calculated to in-
terfere with the administration of jus-tice” and denied the appeal.
By then Sen was no longer chief minis-ter. In the year following the sweets ban, the situation in West Bengal had deterio-rated hugely, with the Communists capi-talising on the discontent caused by the bans to foment riots and strikes. Seeing the reaction at the grassroots, several Congressmen lead by Ajoy Mukherjee left to form the Bangla Congress which managed to come to power in the 1967 elections, with support from the Communists and Muslims. But it was an unstable pact, with the Communists openly manoeuvring to gain power which lead to several periods of President’s Rule. The Congress would try to regain ground under SS Ray, but the drift away could not to be stopped, and finally in 1977, the Left Front took power and stayed in office for 34 years. Sen’s sweet order was not the only cause for the Congress collapse in West Bengal, but it remained a bitter memory of the problems of their rule.
The ban had one positive consequence. Bengali sweet makers realised they had to look beyond the state for milk supply and markets without the fear of bans. In the early 1970s, KC Das set up its first store out-side Calcutta in the centre of Bangalore, at the juncture of Church Street and St. Mark’s Road. “The government eventual-ly changed power in West Bengal, but the fear had persisted in the industry what if it comes back, so we had to move out to newer markets,” said Das.
Thousands of customers were intro-duced to the joys of mishti dhoi at the Bangalore outlet, and they, at least, might find something to commemorate on the 50th anniversary of Sen’s mis-guided food ban.
Below: Sen, an austere Gandhian, possibly saw sweets as inessential luxuries
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THE BITTERESTBAN
50 years ago, a particularly startling food ban was imposed in Bengal, and had lasting consequences. Milk sweets were banned under the West Bengal Channa Sweets Control Order imposed by Congress chief minister Prafulla Chandra Sen
1.Rahul Kapoor, owner, Daily Needs, was selling 60 packets of Maggi daily. Now he barely sells 15-20 packets of other brands
2. Vendors like Tom Uncle Maggi Point have suffered after the ban
3. Maggi was the staple food of bachelors
Meet The Smart Urban Vehicle ZF’s First Concept vehicle that is extremely manoeuvrable
For shops to suddenly shift from their core focus was not easy. Some sweet shops challenged the order in Calcutta High Court, which duly struck it down
Until the eighties, the concept of fast food in India was limit-ed to roadside chaat or, at best, vadas and sandwiches. Even at home, quick snacks were pakoras and samosas north of the Vindhyas and dosa or vadas in the south. But all of them took some amount of preparatory effort. Then Maggi happened in1982. Its trump card was ease of cooking — 2 minutes, the chirpy jingle said. Beaming children slurping up Maggi noodles in the brand’s crack-ling ad helped in no small
measure. But the noodles barely tickled older palates. People weaned on rice, dal and roti never really took to instant noodles. Maggi remained an occasional indulgence, mainly of school-going children of urban par-ents even in the early nine-ties.
Economic liberalisation and the consequent movement of young men and women to ur-ban centres in search of high-er education and jobs created an explosion in demand for foods that could be made
quickly and cheaply. One of the biggest beneficiaries of that demand was Maggi. It al-most took three generations for the noodle brand to be-come a household name. And once it became a staple for many, it stayed that way, dominating the market; the bright yellow packets stacked in even tiny tea shops in dis-tant Ladakh. When the noodle was taken off the shelves last month, Maggi had a market share of over 70% and a brand value of ̀ 2,000 crore.
Dinesh Narayan
Gloom at Maggi Dhabas
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14 Saturday FeatureThe Economic Times, Mumbai, Saturday, 25 July 2015
