Business Abroad: One-Man Aid

In an office on Calcutta’s fashionable Park Street last week, fluorescent lights burned late into the night as a team of engineers bent over their drawing boards rushing to complete plans for Asia’s biggest steam power plant. By 1964 the 300 megawatt Bandel power station is scheduled to supply badly needed electricity to Calcutta’s industrial belt. But almost as significant to the Indian economy as the $54 million project itself is the fact that the engineers designing it are all Indians—members of Kuljian Corp. of India, the first Indian-run consulting engineering firm capable of handling so complex a power job.

Kuljian Corp. of India is the product of a one-man foreign aid program conceived by fatherly Harry Asdour Kuljian, 67, the Armenian-born founder of Kuljian Corp. of Philadelphia, a small but highly successful consulting engineering firm. Since 1930 Kuljian has handled construction jobs—mostly in the power-generating field—all over the world. By first-hand observation, he became convinced that to give U.S. aid money to underdeveloped nations to establish state-owned enterprises was both wasteful and a threat to free enterprise. The right way to help a nation industrialize, Kuljian decided, was through “a hand-in-hand partnership” in which U.S. enterprise would supply the initial capital, train local management and labor to do the job, and then trust them.

Man to Envy. Twelve years ago, Kuljian met Sadhan C. Dutt, an energetic young Indian mechanical engineer who had come to the U.S. to learn electrical engineering at the General Electric Co. Dutt boldly suggested that Kuljian set him up as permanent Kuljian representative in India. Kuljian agreed, trained Dutt for a year in Philadelphia, then sent him off to India in 1950 to run a newly established Indian subsidiary.

For three disappointing years, Dutt sat in a one-room Calcutta office with no work in sight, gloomily recalling his rash promise to Kuljian to bring in contracts. Every year Kuljian went to India to encourage him to stick it out. Recalls Dutt: “He used to say, ‘I envy you. You are young. Your country is growing; it has a tremendous future.’ “

At last Dutt won a contract to build the $28 million Durgapur steam power plant in West Bengal. He got the job by combining the nationalistic appeal that Indian engineers would do most of the work with a reassuring promise that the U.S. Kuljian Corp. would stand by to assist. To the Indian government, it was an irresistible deal: because he designed the Bokaro steam plant, which became a model for all thermal plants in India, Harry Kuljian’s name was already held in high regard in New Delhi.

Mixed Bag. After the Durgapur job, Kuljian Corp. of India was on its way. Dutt, who works a 13-hour day, now has $153 million worth of contracts, has twice moved his offices into larger quarters. Unlike many Indian businessmen, who will hire only natives of their own state, Dutt has collected 50 crack engineers from Punjab, Bengal, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh. Says he, in words that could have come from Harry Kuljian himself: “If you have the ability, Kuljian will use it.”

So pleased is Kuljian with his first experiment in foreign aid that next year he will bring ten Pakistani engineers to Philadelphia and train them to take over Kuljian Corp. of Pakistan. He is thinking, too, of adopting similar programs in Thailand and Iraq, where he also does substantial business. Meantime, he has turned over 51% interest in the Indian company to Dutt and his associates. The remaining 49%, promises Kuljian, will also go to his Indian partners over the next 25 years “as they prove they can handle the job.”