Today was my 500th factory visit in 2000 days as Convenor of the MegaFund. The journey has taken me in our quest of identifying new breakthrough technologies from places like serum institute at Poona to Jindal stainless in Gurgaon, from Premier Energy at Hyderabad to L&T at Hazira, from Chowgule shipyard in Goa to high wall coal mining in Annupur, from nuclear parts fabrication in Palakkad to metro body shell fabrication in Pune, from body implants in Surat to coal bed methane in West Bengal.
But today, like every other “plant visit day” was special. It is always a delight to meet real engineers running real plants against all odds – finally not just to make a living like everyone else but also to make India proud. Many tanks Jindal Stainless, our Distinguished Fellow Yatinder Pal Singh Suri, the young and enthusiastic Abhyoday Jindal and the veteran steelman Vijay Sharma. Saw cladded steel and used a neutron reader to check composition of stainless steel instantly. Also finally figured out how to machine and smoothen a fifty feet long steel pipe from inside (I just couldn’t figure it out for a long long time). Also learnt challenges in lattice matching with molybdenum to inhibit the corrosion pathway. It was scarily similar to how we do nano scale lattice matching (or mismatching) in semiconductors.