Tan Sri B. C. Shekhar - Grandfather of the Rubber Industry

 

Tan Sri B. C. Shekhar (Unni) was one of the most influential people in my life, as we shared the same professional interests - Polymers.

His path crossed mine in 1968 when I was working as a researcher at the Rubber and Plastics Research Association of Great Britain (RAPRA). He visited the institute to meet with his colleague, Dr. Bill Watson who was the Director. 

Dr. Watson was the guardian of Unni’s son who had been admitted to a school in the UK. I was invited to an exclusive lunch with my Director and Unni.

We hit it off from the very first minute as we had many common interests, besides polymers. I had no idea how famous he was when we discussed his family roots in Trichur in Kerala and mine. 

The next year he made another visit and after the official engagements we dined together. He took a liking to Annikki and treated her like his daughter.

I returned to Chennai and started a consulting company, Polymer Consultancy Services with my brother who was also a rubber technologist. He was the introvert while I was the extrovert and the front face of our consulting company.

Unni came to Chennai and my brother organised a meeting of the local rubber institute to meet Unni.

Unni was travelling with his family so he asked my brother to organise an evening with me. I took them to the beautiful Madras beach and organised a delicious spread from the local Buhari restaurant.

There was a purpose in his asking for the meeting as he made me a proposal as he wanted our consulting company to act as the representatives of the Malaysian Rubber Research Board in India to promote the work of the Malaysian Rubber Industry in India and finally ensure that India imported natural rubber from Malaysia. He had a small office in Bombay from where they would feed information to the Indian rubber industry. He had an information officer who did all the work and he wanted me to take over managing that work.

I told Unni that I was concentrating on plastics and my brother was handling all matters with rubber. He told me Dr. Watson had spoken so highly of my work in England and that was why he was approaching me. Also he knew of our close family association with MRF Ltd. which was doing well as a tyre producer in India, giving a tough fight to the foreign companies Dunlop, Firestone snd Goodyear, who were producing tyres in India.

My brother is a pessimist, but as I had programmed our consulting company as the source of information on polymers in India, as I had obtained the rights to produce the world’s largest information source, RAPRA Abstracts, to be published and distributed in India, this was a logical extension of our work.

We moved the operation from Bombay to Madras and C. R. Das, the information officer, became a good addition to my local consulting team. His wife was a library scientist and she helped to organise our great library of Polymer books and information which I had transported back from England.

My brother also became more active as he had something constructive to do with the India rubber industry in India.

Unni interacted with both of us and he wanted to do more. 

When his elder brother, B. C. Chandran, retired from the Shell Borneo Club and settled in Coimbatore, Unni asked my brother to set up a company to do soil and leaf testing for the rubber plantations to give vital fertiliser input information to the Indian planters. He wanted his brother to be the Managing Director of the new company. They started the new company but there was no motivator and it was just limping along.

 (Chandran's two daughter married two brothers, sons of he Menon family who owned the Leela Lace Group.)

On one visit to India, Unni held a Board Meeting and he called me in as an observer. There he proposed that I eould be brought in as the Business Development Director of the company. The other Board members acceded to this demand, so I took over the job.

I revamped the company and not only did I expand the soil and leaf testing activities but having the best agronomists available to me I started a business of looking after farms. The first of those was the one belonging to the Raman Research Institute which had been created by the Nobel Laureate late Sir C. V. Raman out of some of the money he won when he got for his Nobel Prize. That work was a huge success and I got other local farms to manage.

However, I had to get back to my primary job, so I asked to be relieved of this responsibility of Agropolymers and it reverted to the original path of setting up standardised rubber production plants in Kerala.

The work of the information Centre of MRRDB had progressed well and India started to import rubber from Malaysia. The job was done and I withdrew into the background and let my brother let the friendship flourish.

Unni was a great scientist and an ever better politician. He developed the technique of doubling and trebling the flow of rubber latex from the rubber tree by applying ammonia to the tree trunk which stopped the clotting mechanism. He however held back this information as he knew it would have a dramatic effect on the plantation labour who would be retrenched. He ensured the plantation labour was gradually reduced so that when he released his research findings there was no panic. 

It came as a shock to the international rubber industry, as a few years earlier he had made a speech in the US saying that natural rubber would become substantially cheaper than synthetic rubber. All had laughed at him but they later held their tongues. 

He was awarded the Raman Magsaysay Award and the given many titles in Malaysia and finally the title of Tan Sri.

After heading the Rubber Research Institute, he then formed the Malaysian Rubber Research Board and the International Rubber Research Crntre in the UK. He then headed the International Rubber Industry and produced patent after patent. He later also headed the Palm Oil Research Institute in Malaysia.

He developed the DELINK process for chemical reclamation of used rubber. It was then he wrote to me and expressed how much he would have wanted my input in launching this novel technique. 

It was the ultimate honour to be remembered by this great man.

When I moved to Finland, both Unni and his wife kept in touch occasionally. Unni was greatly impressed that I had mastered yet another field, Microelectronics.

It was a sad day when I heard of his passing in Chennai in 2006. As a friend he trusted me implicitly. My brother is what he is today because of the lifelong friendship of Unni and myself.

May my mentor rest in peace.

Agropolymers

When I finished my graduation in England in Polymer and Plastics Science and Technology, I joined the Rubber and Plastics Research Association (RAPRA) of Great Britain, the British Government research centre located in Shawbury, a village in the county of Shropshire, west of Birmingham, on the Welsh border.

My Director was a Dr. Bill Watson. He was the local guardian for a young Malaysian boy of Indian origin.This was the son of Dr. B. C Sehkar (BC), the father of the Natural Rubber industry. BC and I became rather good friends as he used to visit RAPRA on all his visits to the UK. Our common Indian Kerala roots formed a deep bond between us. (Later BC was awarded the Magsaysay Award, the Asian Nobel Prize, and also given the Malaysian title, Tan Sri. Besides being the Chairman of the Malaysian Rubber and Research development Board, he was also Chairman of the Malyasian palm Oili Board. Born in 1929, he died in 2006.)

In 1969, I returned to India and set up my consultancy company, Polymer Consultancy Services (PCS), with my brother. He concentrated on the Rubber Industry, while I, being the extrovert, took on the job of Business Development and the Plastics Industry. Both of us were very active in our professional associations, rubber and plastics.

One day I got a call from BC saying he was passing through Madras and asking whether it would it be possible to meet. I asked my brother to organise a meeting so that BC could meet the local rubber industrialists and technologists.

I was not able to attend the talk as I had my own hectic schedule. BC insisted we meet for a quiet dinner. He was interested in taking his family to the beach. I organised a moonlit dinner on the beautiful sandy beach in Madras. I organised some wonderful food from Buharis and my favourite biriyani pace.

BC was interested in hearing how I had succeeded in setting up the consultancy company in India, as he was looking at his personal future. He felt that he may take the Malaysian root of an early retirement at the age of 50! He was not sure whether he would continue in his role as he was not sure how all his futuristic plans would be received by the Malaysian Government.

He offered me a great opportunity that he wanted me to take over the Malaysian Rubber Bureau, which was a small set up in Bombay which distributed literature of the Malaysian Research Institute and their research centre in the UK. He wanted me to promote the Malaysian rubber industry in India so that India would consider importing rubber from Malaysia.

My brother was never a decision maker. I jumped at the opportunity on the condition that he would look after this side of the business. So was born the MRB division of our consultancy company - a huge publicity boost for me as I already had a tie up with my old employer - RAPRA.

BC had long term plans. His brother, Chandran was retiring from the Oil Industry in Borneo. He had been working as the hospitality manager for Shell there and he took early retirement and decided to settle down in india. BC wanted to establish his base in India through his brother, so he decided to start a company along with another Malaysian friend who was an agronomist. The idea was to introduce soil and leaf analysis for the rubber growing industry, where samples of soil and leaf would be taken, prepared and sent to Malaysia, where they would be analyzed. From that, fertilising recommendations would be sent to the growers in india so as to optimise the output, as had been done in Malaysia.

With a couple of friends, and my brother in tow, they decided to start some organisation, but things did not move as they kept talking and talking.

Finally in desperation, BC called me in to one meeting when he was in Madras and asked me to present my views on how they should go about this venture.

My visions were crystal clear in those days. I had very vibrant ideas. All the parties immediately fell for my strategy. The Agro Polymer Research and Development Pvt. Ltd. company was born. I was appointed as the Business Development Director of the organisation, with Chandran, BC's brother as the Managing Director.

We worked well as a team, as Chandran knew that I made decisions and moved things forward. The soil and leaf testing service was quickly established with one of Dr. Guha's nephews as the field officer gathering the samples.

Agropol as it was known, quickly became well known in the field of soil and leaf testing. We had the nephew of Dr. Guha who would go to the rubber (and also tea and coffee estates) and collect the soil and leaf samples, which would be dried and then sent to Malaysia for testing. The results with the fertilising recommendations would be sent back and this would be handed over to the estates.

Further projects were in the pipeline as a plant to produce Standardized Malaysian Rubber (SMR) also called Heavea Crumb Rubber, based on Malaysian technology.

Word got around about our activities.

One day I got a call from the Raman Research Institute, which was a Fundamental Physics Research Centre set up by Sir C. V. Raman after he had received the Nobel Price for Physics. He had passed on and the Institute was being run by one of his sons.

With the Nobel Prize money, Sir Raman had bought a 100 acre farm on the outskirts of Bangalore at a place called Kengeri. With great vision he had planted different areas. It was an idyllic setting with a river running on three sides and a small tank on the fourth. He had casuarina trees, cashewnut trees, a whole range of fruit trees, and areas for growing a variety of flowers, medicinal plants as well as some grain as maize and paddy.

After the death of Sir CV, the farm was not being maintained well, so they called me in to see whether I could revive it to glory of when Sir CV was living there. I was given quite a leeway, a small budget and instructions that I should grow a special rice that Lady Raman, who was still alive, liked to eat.

It was a huge challenge as I knew nothing about farming. But I learnt fast, starting with the cash crops, the best being the African Marigold which could be sold daily in the main city market, as it is the primary flower used by the Hindus who visit temples. This meant harvesting the flowers at 4 and 5 am and transporting them to the city in bullock carts so that they could arrive in time for the morning auctions where all the small and big buyers would turn up, look at the quality of the flowers and bid for them.

This kept up a steady cash flow.

I started taking care of the fruit yielding trees, doing the soil and leaf analysis so that they could be correctly fertilised and the yield increased. This was done for the mango, chikku, cashewnut and many other fruit trees growing on the estate.

I then started to look at the medicinal plants that Sir CV had introduced into the estate, which included winca rosa and Dioscorea. I introduced citronella from which oil could be extracted and sold to the medical and toiletry industries. I continued the seasonal planting of rice and maize.

The trees were pruned and more trees planted.

All this kept a healthy budget and cash flow and the inputs from the Research Centre to support the farm was gradually reduced.

When I felt the work was done, I arranged for Lady Raman to visit the farm over the Pongal Festival so that she could see how the farm looked. She was so happy that she told me that she could now rest in peace. She died a few months later.

As a result of this, several other farmers in the region asked for us to take over their farms. We took one, but it was more a diary farm, and one which I could not do the justice as our strength was in growing crops and not maintaining a herd of cows! Also it had nothing to do with soil and leaf testing or Agro Polymers!

It was an exciting time of my life as I learnt how tough was the life of an Indian farmer, especially when water was a problem, such as when drought conditions prevailed.

Agropol was doing well in the soil and leaf testing business, so we slowly withdrew from this farm management business. I had to get back to my main field of Polymer and Plastics Science and Technology, as I was appointed managing and Technical director of another company.

However, this experience was worth every minute as it made me understand and respect the massive rural population of India and understand how hard a life they faced to feed the teeming millions of India.