Offtrack: Calcutta: Primed For Success

From Wooden Gun carriages to shells capable of boring holes in tanks, the gun and shell factory has seen 200 years of changing warfare.

From Wooden Gun carriages to shells capable of boring holes in tanks, the gun and shell factory has seen 200 years of changing warfare.

During the revolt of 1857 when Indian sepoys turned against the British and sparked off a national rebellion, the Cossipore Gun and Shell Factory, situated on the outskirts of Calcutta, was asked to double production in order to speedily replenish the British arsenal. The factory's superintendent, Captain Broome, said that Cossipore could produce 30 artillery guns a month instead of the regular 15. It would just mean an additional night shift. But the proposal was finally shot down. Doubling production, it was felt, would result in a loss of quality. And Cossipore wasn't going to produce sub-standard guns.

In many ways, it was a defining moment for the factory. The emphasis on quality has ensured that even in the business environment of present day West Bengal, where industries are lucky to survive a couple of years, the Cossipore Gun and Shell Factory has managed to live for a couple of hundred.

This isn't the only thing unique about Cossipore. It is easily the oldest of the country's 39 ordnance factories. Around 1800, the East India Company realised that the gun carriages (the barrow on which cannons are mounted) being supplied were of poor quality, primarily because some unscrupulous British officers were benefiting from the commission-based system of ordinance supplies prevalent in the 18th century. So in 1801, 20 bighas of land were acquired at Rs 5,000 in order to set up a factory, which started out as the Gun Carriage Agency. Its first machines were bullock-driven and it churned out wooden carriages to go with the primitive artillery guns of the day.

As warfare changed over the years, so did the Gun and Shell Factory. The antiquated contrivances made way for steam-driven machines and by 1830 a gun foundry was added. The mid-19th century product list records seven varieties of guns, six of howitzers (guns used to lob shells in the general direction of an unseen enemy, for instance, when warring sides are on either face of a hill) and an assortment of shells and mortars. Today, rolling out of Cossipore are shells capable of boring holes in tanks and L-70 anti-aircraft guns capable of bringing down fighters. As the present general manager of the factory, J.R. Kalia says a little morbidly, "The methods of killing have changed. We've survived because we've changed with them."

Surviving, however, was not always guaranteed. In 1806 work was suspended and workers retrenched. It was only the king of Persia's order for gun carriages that saved the day. Less than a decade later, when the East India Company was engaged in battles in northern India, British officers felt that wood seasoned in Bengal wasn't suitable for the climatic extremes of the north. A gun carriage agency was set up in Fatehgarh as a result. And in 1829 all of Cossipore's machinery was shifted to the new factory.

But by that time, the gun factory at Fort William was being criticised for "high cost and bad performance". It fell on Cossipore to correct that situation-and prevent its own closure. More recently, when Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army marched into Manipur in 1942, the British, fearing the worst, shifted the factory to Kanpur. The ordnance factory at Kanpur still stands. So does Cossipore.

And with it survive buildings and systems that are about to see the turn of the bicentenary. The 6,000-odd workers at the factory still have to punch their cards into a mechanical punching machine-a colonial legacy that may not be as fancy as modern swipe cards but is just as effective. When it was introduced, it was the first in the country. One in a list of several firsts that Cossipore can boast of: in 1892, steel was manufactured for the first time in India; and post independence, the first tractors manufactured by the public sector trundled out of this factory.

One thing about Cossipore is that it doesn't seem to have a past. Antiquated artillery guns with their cold shells lie strewn about on the premises in random pattern, giving the place a sense of history. Of battles lost and won. But even these seem to look up and look ahead.