Colonial legacies and the British geological survey in cold war south Asia: 1960s–1980s

ABSTRACT

This article explores change and continuity in the institutional objectives and actions of the British Geological Survey across independent South Asian countries, namely India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and Burma/Myanmar. By focusing on this geographical space from the 1960s, the article tells a political tale of adjustment, in which the colonial background of the British presence in the region was overlain by the Cold War foreground of international competition. The Geological Survey had the required pedigree to prolong the British presence in important technical arenas of these emerging nation-states, albeit within the redefined parameters of development, overlapping interests, and competing benefits. The article sketches the Survey’s history of exchange and collaboration across South Asian countries (except Bhutan), as its projects adapted to national preferences and global pressures. It traces how and why its proposals prioritised certain interactions over others and tracks the ways-and-means through which it pursued geological and attendant commercial aims. The article also attempts to situate these interplays within regional and ideological frames, within which politically conscious technocrats sought capital and influence to reorient earth science objectives so that these could simultaneously accrue national products and generate neo-colonial prestige.

KEYWORDS:

• British geological survey
• South Asia
• cold war

Introduction

Great Britain ended its South Asian empire in the late-1940s, but this relinquishing of direct power was accompanied by a rewiring of informal influence via a new Commonwealth in 1949 (Moore 1987). Within this diplomatic template, educational and cultural, technical and business exchanges provided key avenues for refashioning people-to-people contacts and rebuilding institutional connections (Byrne 2016, 119–135). Among these, the then-Geological Survey of Great Britain (GSGB) provides one understudied avenue. Founded in 1835 as the Ordnance Geological Survey (OGS), it was renamed the Institute of Geological Sciences (IGS) in 1965, and the British Geological Survey (BGS) in 1984. These changes in its nomenclature themselves reflect the changing status of Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, for if the British science of geology drove British expansion (Stafford 1984), then naturally British contraction had an adverse effect on it. From London’s vantage point, geological surveys ‘improved dependencies … encouraged emigration, created markets and provided new sources of supply. In the colonies, however, the view was very different’ (Stafford 1989, 198). Still, the scientific notions of independent South Asian nation-states were significantly determined by a colonial-‘historical’ deployment of science there (Philip 2004, 4).

A parallel development was occurring across the Atlantic, where the American Interior Department ‘operated in a global field’ similarly, in an ‘ever-widening quest for minerals’ thereby providing a frame for ‘analyzing US global engagement’ (Black 2018, 4). It was born within a mid-nineteenth century contest for that continent and undertook ‘the day-to-day work of US settler colonialism’, while its mineral pursuits in the twentieth century had crucial origins in America’s ‘global reach’. With the post-1945 emergence of anti-imperialism coinciding with the evolving east–west Cold War, the civilian Interior Department grew as a ‘welcome corrective’ to American military interventions in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia (Black 2018, 5). As early as March 1950, personnel from its Geological Survey Division were in India (Orissa) to ‘assist’ their counterparts.¹ Minerals, evocatively called the ‘sticky symbols of imperial lust’ by Megan Black, were now targeted cooperatively by offering ‘technical expertise’ (Black 2018, 6). In South Asia, this made for what David C. Engerman termed as ‘dueling delegations’ carrying development loans (chiefly the Americans), and project aid (mostly the Soviet Union), with Britain ‘gift-wrapping loan repayments’ (Engerman 2018, 11, 28, 63). By 1953, an Economic Commission for Asia and Far-East (ECAFE) of twenty countries was surveying their geology, considered a ‘politically innocent subject’.²

In showing a relatable transition made by a British institution in the post-1947 period across South Asia, this article searches the BGS’s archives for plans of prospecting mines, mapping minerals, and providing training. Action proved difficult on these due to lack of funding, as well as because of ‘the profound changes that were redefining the Commonwealth’ (Byrne 2018, 78). This multi-country story reveals the stresses inherent in extending an outdated imperial template for a post-colonial exchange of personnel and equipment. As the institution expanded in the successor states of Britain’s Indian empire, enduring colonial interests collided with emerging national-regional imperatives (MacLeod and Kumar 1995). In telling their story, this article attempts the following arguments. First, the BGS’s activities across South Asia served both political and economic purposes via their exploratory and extractive mapping and mining, training and equipment exchanges; initiatives that were conceived as politico-scientific from the outset. This multi-purpose nature is clear both in the differences between the countries that the institution engaged in as well as in its competition with other international players, and reflects competing ‘sociotechnical imaginaries of the nation’ (Sarkar 2022, 14). From its inheritance of the ‘fitful flirtation’ of the East India Company’s ‘gentlemanly’ science in the eighteenth century, and its involvement in the Crown Rule’s scientific focus on finding ‘the profitable mean course’, the BGS now engaged with science as ‘a public importance, a social impact and a cultural resonance’ in the post-1947 era (Arnold 2000, 25; 213 and Kumar 2006, 164).

Second, in addition to the ‘small and shrinking mouse’ of British bilateral aid vis-à-vis the ‘growing mountain of poverty’ in the region (Lipton 1996, 484), the geopolitical dimensions of the BGS’s work within the Cold War (Wolfe 2013) saw much of the institution’s former fluidity being constrained amidst Pakistan’s internal crises including the creation of Bangladesh, Afghanistan’s external interlocutors, India’s international relations, Burma/Myanmar’s domestic changes, Nepal’s insular existence, and Ceylon/Sri Lanka’s institutional actions. Inter-state relations too determined its work, notably in the cases of India-Pakistan and India-Nepal, and here the ‘former empire serve[d] as a historic legacy in defining the [first] parameters of its engagement’ (Jabed 2012, 732). Finally, this example of the techno-politics of decolonisation and the Cold War also shows the ways in which post-colonial economies moved towards science via institutions like the BGS. The political character of these interactions and the strategic thinking behind these developmental activities were weighed in a cost–benefit exercise, thereby making geology an economic instrument for pursuing geopolitics across South Asia.

India: ‘politico-scientific prestige-type’ projects

It was not until the early-1960s that the then-OGS resumed its contacts with the Geological Survey of India (GSI), which it described as ‘the best non-white geological survey in the world … with its long British association’.³ This resumption came in response to welcome developments in India like the increase of the GSI’s staff to 400 in contrast to 18 in the 1930s. Until then, it was something that in the words of David Arnold was neither ‘wholly colonial fish nor exclusively indigenous fowl’ (MacLeod and Kumar 1995, 20). Indeed, ‘the colonial state never took the initiative in mineral industries that it did in relation to railways and irrigation’ and ‘the GSI could never become like the Bureau of Mines in the US or Canada’ (Chakrabarti 2004, 142–145). Unsurprisingly, a parallel programme was run by the private house of John Taylor & Sons, who had prospered in Kolar gold and copper fields pre-1947 and were invited for excavations in Panna diamond mines afterwards (Vernon 2015, 127–143).

During the war-years of the 1940s, the GSI was ‘largely incapable’ of playing a leading role, despite the fact that by then ‘urgent issues of mineral, industry and national security’ had attained ‘peripheral autonomy’ for research (Chakrabarti 2004, 117–142). As the Nehruvian state turned towards science (Arnold 2013, 360–370), the first question concerned the oil position in the country, which depended ‘for 90%’ of its supplies on the Anglo-Americans. There appeared a ‘slender possibility’ of oil in the Rajputana desert and near the Himalayan foothills and, with private enterprise unwilling and Partition making it difficult for Burmah Shell ‘to move oil’ from Assam, the ‘possibility of obtaining oil from Russia’ was explored.⁴ Simultaneously, the government made efforts towards increased 1:50,000 mapping, age determination and geochemical prospecting for minerals, applied geology around water-supply, technical training, and photogeology under a GSI whose strength of 130 in 1949 was to increase to 250, when it celebrated its centenary in 1951 in the presence of a Soviet science delegation.⁵ There were four major internal issues in India that plagued any technical cooperation in this arena. These were first, a ‘time and energy-wasting bureaucracy’, which simultaneously displayed an acquisitive tendency towards equipment, second, a lack of clarity about payment as New Delhi ruled out foreign currency exchange, third, a priority accorded to educational and agricultural aid under schemes like the Colombo Plan (Oakman 2010) and the United Nations Development Programme, and lastly, a penchant for ‘over-ambitious and unrealistic’ projects.⁶

Otherwise, the GSI’s emphases were in areas in which the OGS was willing and able to be involved. These represented ‘politically advantageous’ specialised ‘prestige-type’ projects, which were ‘relatively inexpensive’, as the OGS was conscious that independent India was a different playing field (Singh 1993), with ‘numerous technical schemes run by … USA, Japan, France, West Germany, USSR’.⁷ That this arena comprised ‘countries that were, until recently, under the aegis of the Secretary of State for colonies’ could help as much as hinder.⁸ By the mid-1950s, as India’s mineral production increased, it attracted ‘eagerness [and] oil survey proposals’ from US companies, European countries and, above all, the Soviet state.⁹ The latter embarked on a five-year period of extensive Indo-Soviet talks, trade and technical exchange on power projects, steel and aluminium industry, and oil exploration, putting previous American efforts (in West Bengal) and British enterprise (in Assam) in the shade.¹⁰

From the mid-1960s, Indo-British exchanges of technical personnel, equipment, management and training, especially in matters of iron & steel, were back on an upswing, in time for the International Geological Congress held in New Delhi in December 1964. But now, US aid entered this field in a country-wide mineral survey called ‘Operation Hard Rock’,¹¹ as the mid-1960s saw both the ‘heyday of the economic Cold War’ (Engerman 2018, 87), with petroleum explorations becoming extra-sensitive, and the ‘rise of a more militant strand of Third World nationalism’, which made extractive operations overseas more tenuous (Black 2018, 12). In 1966, when a request came from India to allow Professor Eremenko, a Soviet project manager at the Institute for Petroleum Exploration (Dehra Dun), to access ‘drilling data’ on the Himalayan region and Assam, and to offer him ‘an opportunity to see offshore prospecting methods’,¹² the latter request was turned down on account of confidentiality, while consultations on the former were limited to the pre-1947 data. As the Indian side started to seek help in staff training, expert exchange, and equipment – like installing of a smelting furnace at Hindustan Zinc Ltd. (Udaipur) – the now-IGS was willing to offer ‘mapping and laboratory services’ but not drilling,¹³ and not much else unless New Delhi paid for it.

Consequently, others were stealing the march on them. While American-aided ‘Operation Hard Rock’ was on, the Soviets, East Germany and France offered further aero-magnetic survey,¹⁴ while Japan, Eastern and Western Europe, and the USSR were listed as ‘major markets’ for Indian minerals in the twentieth anniversary report by the Indian Bureau of Mines (est. 1948).¹⁵ In 1970, the news came that France was to join the Soviets and the Americans in undertaking seismic studies and offshore search for minerals,¹⁶ and personnel from the private enterprise of Huntings Geology & Geophysics Ltd. came to the IGS and requested support to the tune of £ 150,000-500,000 over two years for a similar bid. Huntings had been in touch with both the British High Commission and the Ministry of Mines & Minerals in New Delhi. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London took the line that money would be offered if ‘mineral exploration in import substitution and foreign exchange could have trade benefits … ’¹⁷ It was aware that on technical assistance for mineral processing, mining, and aerial geophysics, British organisations were being edged out by the ‘aggressive sales methods [of the] French aid programme, linked unashamedly to French commercial interests’.¹⁸ A quarter-century on from 1947, it was clear that while the Indian side was ‘more anxious to attract technological know-how at British expense’,¹⁹ the Labour-era overseas development aid was set against such private sector agreements. As a result, after visiting India in March 1971, the chief scientific adviser to the government bemoaned that:

We have fallen way behind the US, France, Western Germany, Canada, and the USSR (and even Japan) in co-operation over big projects … They see our attitude deriving from the feeling … that the UK once ran India, and independent India can now sweat it out on her own … ²⁰

While Britain still accounted for about half of the total foreign investment in India, much of this pre-dated independence, and, while Britain was still giving India four-times more aid than to any other country, more than half of this was for import-loans, with the rest for joint-venture capital equipment. There was also a feeling in the FCO that it was the restrictive Indian policies that inhibited collaboration, with an accompanying acceptance that ‘we have to miss opportunities [there] because we consider our limited resources can be used more effectively elsewhere’.²¹ Indeed, in the Lok Sabha, in November 1971, the Indian government acknowledged its ‘conscious decision to limit the import of technology only to areas where gaps exist … In regard to foreign investments, we are even more selective … ’²²

Against this bleak backdrop, the year 1976 came as a shot in the arm for the IGS in India. First, it saw the start of their Betwa river groundwater project that had risen from New Delhi requesting London, back in 1970, for British participation in an assessment of groundwater resources in the hard rock terrain of peninsular India across 18,000 sq. kms. The request was reiterated in July 1972, after which the chief hydrologist of IGS had visited the area in April 1973, and trimmed down the scope of the project to 8000 sq. kms, still costing £ 550,920 (to rise later to £ 800,000). It was a first-of-its-kind ‘politico-scientific’ enterprise in India to be generously supported by London ‘since independence … directed towards irrigation’.²³ With the US Agency for International Development departing from India in 1973 for political reasons, there were three active hydrogeology projects left, under Food & Agricultural Organisation, Canada and Sweden.²⁴ Second, 1976 was the 125th year of the founding of the GSI (est. 1851 with an Irish ‘sub-imperial … personnel’, Crosbie 2009), and Dr. J. V. Hepworth of the IGS made multiple trips to the country, hoping to carve out a bigger niche from the £ 90 million annual funds for India earmarked by the then-Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM).²⁵ After his ten-day visit in April-May, Hepworth waxed eloquent on both the problems and the possibilities in India, beyond its size and complexity, which were unique among the thirty-one Asian countries that he looked after:

It is difficult not only to cover the range of possibilities for projects but also to identify areas in which there is a real need. It is also evident that Indian self-confidence in their technical ability is such that resentment would be aroused by any hint of patronage or over-selling … At the same time there are difficulties in recognising suitable projects within … constraints observed by the Indian Planning.²⁶

The British High Commission in New Delhi was similarly wary of any expanded and expensive collaboration on continental shelf exploration. Hepworth returned to Calcutta in December 1976 for the celebrations of the 125th anniversary of the GSI. He was one of fifteen foreign delegates present there, but the only one who was feted, given the ancestral role of the GSGB, with Thomas Oldham, the first Director-General recalled as the father of Indian geology. Afterall, in Calcutta existed its ‘founder’ Job Charnock’s grave, which was made of grey granite, named Charnockite in his honour by T. H. Holland of the GSI in 1900.²⁷ This nostalgic junketing comprised much speechifying, and Hepworth got into the spirit of it thus:

May I use the occasion to express certain ‘grandfatherly’ thoughts … ? You have increased your numbers of professional geoscientists from 30 to 2000 in 30 years; is the result, in quality and quantity of work, ‘daily life’ facilities, and human (or geological contact) commensurate with the increase?²⁸

One of the ideas discussed in this emergency-era event in India was the setting up of a National Geological Museum, in which Hepworth was much interested. However, it was a project for which neither The British Council in India nor the British High Commission had any enthusiasm.²⁹ Nevertheless, this event and Hepworth’s reports renewed interest in the GSI and produced a recognition that notwithstanding excessive bureaucracy that precluded sensitive areas like marine geology, there was a possibility for ‘a fruitful link with IGS in geochronology’.³⁰ This was in line with the Thomson Plan, coming from the then-British High Commissioner in India, for future British activity under: (a) agriculture, science, technology and health, (b) educational development, (c) English studies and (d) information science. The National Geological Museum, on the other hand, was mooted along the lines of London’s Natural History Museum, and it did ‘not rate high’ in this scale of priorities.³¹ Hepworth’s IGS colleague, Dr. Bleackley, pushed for it as both ‘a matter of courtesy and education’, but also ‘so that we were not losing an opportunity to provide a comparatively small service that would pay dividends at least in goodwill … ’³² The issue soon lost steam, when the post-emergency non-Congress union government in India did not wish to proceed with what it considered a project of sycophancy and jingoism.³³ By the end of this eventful decade, it was clear that whereas the governmental corpus of technical cooperation funds for India was now touching £100 million per year, the problem of diverting some of it towards IGS was considerable.

With this Commonwealth country being a notable commercial market for other resourceful players, the British Council and the British High Commission were disinclined to support scientific cooperation, which were neither ‘educational’ nor ‘money earning’.³⁴ In this scenario, to nobody’s surprise, the ODM-IGS lost a contract to a French company on a proposal for training in organic geochemistry and carbonate sedimentology, which had been submitted by Robertson Research Ltd. to New Delhi in December 1976.³⁵ Next year, experts from France, Hungary, Canada, the Soviet Union and Iran visited the freshly discovered Bauxite deposits along the eastern ghats,³⁶ and in 1980, the West German government provided money for oceanic search, carrying forward the work started by a British vessel.³⁷ The latter tried to salvage the situation in 1980 by enabling a team from British Mining Consultants Ltd. (Enfield, Middlesex) to undertake a two-year training and technical consultancy to Coal India on a mechanised longwall mining system. This was the sort of stuff with its historical echoes of colonial geologists in India being first and foremost ‘prospectors of coal’ in the 1880s, as coal was then Britain’s ‘passport to prosperity’ (Chakrabarti 2004, 99–103), which was to henceforth produce packages of ‘equipment, training and consultancy’ in India, in the process procuring ‘possible opportunities for British industry’.³⁸

Pakistan: ‘technical-political’ education

Across the Radcliffe Line, a Geological Survey of Pakistan (GSP) had emerged from the 1947 division of the GSI. Mirroring the pattern of Partition, it had seen an uneven sharing of resources, with Pakistan getting 5/30 geologists and no offices or laboratories. Hitherto too, that part of the subcontinent had received minimal attention, with barely 1% of its area geologically mapped, an exception being the Las Bela (Kalat/Baluchistan) state, on the border of Sindh.³⁹ Subsequently, the GSP was established in Quetta, with the OGS conspicuous by its absence in this ‘corner of a foreign field’ (Talbot 2022). The GSP was propped up by, and its initial reconnaissance mapping and mineral surveys were undertaken with, Canadian assistance under the Colombo Plan (1955/60), American aid (1960/64), and from Pakistan’s membership of the Central Treaty Organisation (till 1979). Indeed, it was in Pakistan that the ‘redirection’ of post-war economic patterns was most evident, as instead of ‘flowing from colonies to metropoles’, trade and investment could now be between ‘politically autonomous’ states, and this change ‘provided license’ for American economic expansion there (Engerman, Friedman, and McAlister 2021, 7). Further, in the crucible of the Cold War, the two agendas of ‘strategic minerals’ and ‘technical assistance’ were merged to contain the ‘increasing politicization in mineral-rich regions throughout the Third World’ (Black 2018, 14).

While the GSP was the only central body responsible for geological surveys, because of Pakistan’s federal structure in the 1950s, many mineral resource corporations had emerged. Its early programme of investigative survey under Mr. Crookshanks (ex-officiating director-GSI) can be seen in a 1948 newspaper report that mentions ‘coal and limestone in East Bengal … Karnaphuli dam-site near Chittagong … chromite in the NWFP … coal near Salt Range, dam-sites in Rawalpindi and Jhelum, survey of high Himalayan states (Chitral, Dir and Swat)’.⁴⁰ Within five years, under the Colombo Plan, the Canadian government set the pace with a geological survey, alongside wheat, cement, railway sleepers, and farm machinery,⁴¹ and soon, unlike the state-managed oil policy in India, the government of Pakistan ‘encouraged foreign firms to undertake programmes freely with minority public participation’.⁴² Through all this, within Britain’s technical cooperation programme to the country, only minor attention was given to it, which amounted mostly to sending short-term specialists for geological mapping. It would not be until the early-1980s that the IGS would propose something major on mineral exploration there. One of the reasons for British reticence was the lack of funds, the other was the fear of failure that the resource-rich Americans had suffered (Kux 2001). Based in the remote town of Quetta, the Americans had entered Pakistan with forty geological personnel and an aid of Rs. one million to the GSP in 1957,⁴³ assuming … 

… full administrative control of the GSP, failing to integrate the Pakistanis who resented the Americans’ rather dictatorial approach in a recently independent country [causing] ill-feeling … [Then they] withdrew very abruptly and there was no phased follow-up. This was a recipe for post-project disaster.⁴⁴

If the GSP was different from the GSI in these ways, then they appeared alike in other ways to the visiting OGS officials. In October 1962, deputy director F. W. Roe came to Pakistan and lamented that applications for geological assistance had to go through ‘five’ ministries and took ‘one month, at the best, in each’. Similarly, there was competition from countries like France (in radioactive minerals), Germany (coal in east Pakistan), Japan, the Soviet Union, as well as the United Nations (iron ore in west Pakistan), who were all sending delegations of ‘technical-political’ nature to the country. The notable lack of British representation was taken to imply a lack of interest and British geologists sought some scientific publicity at a smaller economic cost compared to the American investment, thereby avoiding gratuitous neglect. The areas that presented themselves for such attempts were in cooperation in geochemical prospecting, age determination and palaeontology, and in the training of geologist-administrators. By the mid-1960s, the GSP was up to 190 scientific officers and six hundred supporting staff, who were joined by 31 American geologists; a number that had grown from four in 1956, but their programme was to phase out in 1964/65. Taking building works and field equipment into account, in the fiscal year of 1961/62, America had given Rs. 6,200,000/ – to Pakistan, the largest single amount to a civilian department there. However, this did not preclude conflict of interest between them as the Pakistani geologists stressed their need for basic geological mapping especially for underground water-supply, while their American counterparts insisted on commodity investigation in the typical American policy of appraising resources for strategic use. Another issue was ironic, for the top brass of the GSP seemed to dislike the American style of temporary project-specific recruitments and reminisced about the pre-1947 professionalism of permanent British officers. Roe could not suppress a chuckle:

There are already signs, particularly in areas previously under British administration, that today’s bands of roving ‘specialists’ on short-term contracts are being contrasted unfavourably with the former expatriates. In due course ‘foreign expert’ may well take the place of ‘colonialism’ as a derogatory label! The gift horse (of technical aid) is being looked increasingly closely in the mouth.⁴⁵

A third issue was that Baluchistan, which was the largest province (43% of the area) with the smallest population (4%) in the country apart from being the richest in natural resources albeit the least-developed, was seeing ‘waves of insurgency’ (Siddiqi 2015, 58). Its colonial ‘underdevelopment’, maintained via sardars/chieftains, had seen the British devise the ‘lowest cost per unit of output’ method of pursuing their core interests and bequeathing it to their successors. It was thus that technical education became the major priority of British involvement in Pakistan, although determining this was easier than delivering on it, because of the deteriorating political equations between the country’s two wings. The British aim of trying ‘to balance assistance between them’ meant, in practice, ‘giving greater emphasis to East Pakistan’, as up to then ‘most aid [had] gone to West Pakistan’.⁴⁶ However, events overtook this intent, an illustration of which comes from the Pakistan-Soviet pact signed in July 1961, when Moscow agreed to give Pakistan $ 30 million for oil exploration and training.⁴⁷ Another example comes from the Jaipurhat Limestone and Cement Works project of the late-1960s. Islamabad, having failed to interest the Asian Development Bank in it, had turned to London for the required foreign exchange, expected to be £16 million over a period of 5–7 years. Feasibility reports by private agencies like Powell Duffryn Ltd. speculated that there was no other prospect of finding limestone in east Pakistan, but British diplomats based in Dacca and Rawalpindi had heard that there were large deposits across the border in India. This made the Jaipurhat project less attractive, for they could not ‘rule out the possibility of the border between India and [east] Pakistan being re-opened in the foreseeable future. There might be an attractive bargain waiting to be struck between … the exchange of Pakistani natural gas for Indian limestone. We would look foolish then … ’⁴⁸

What happened instead was an India-Pakistan war, and the birth of Bangladesh, in December 1971, before, during and after which the Pakistani leadership held that Britain favoured India, and subsequently left the Commonwealth upon the latter’s recognition of Bangladesh in January 1972 (Debnath 2012). This, in addition to a continuing funding crunch, set back all IGS activities in Pakistan by at least five years. In 1974, London lost out on a fertiliser project to the Americans, as it could not agree to the capital requested, given that the IGS did not believe the GSP that there was sufficient, mineable phosphate rock in the project’s Hazara area.⁴⁹ By the end of that decade, relations with Pakistan clustered around geopolitics in Iran and Afghanistan, and immigration to Britain (Kalra 2007). Indeed, Britain’s presence in the Pakistan Aid-Consortium was small, unlike its contribution in the India Aid-Consortium (Das Gupta 2009), and its major help to Pakistan had been on projects of multilateral assistance in the Indus river basin, Tarbela dam, and part-electrification of the railways. British aid to Pakistan was plainly ‘marking time’,⁵⁰ and by the early-1980s there was ‘something to be said for the UK being well-represented [in] geological mapping [there]’, being undertaken by private corporations.⁵¹ A sum of £ 1.35 million spread over 5-years was sought and the British embassy in Islamabad pushed for the IGS’s involvement. However, there were countervailing voices too, who mentioned their reservations in supporting mineral ‘exploration rather than exploitation’,⁵² given that any deposits that could be found through this IGS-GSP collaboration would not be profitable before the 1990s. At the IGS, geologists led by Dr. C. R. Jones were perturbed at this penny-pinching, and at the prospect of losing out to private players and their ‘empire-building’,⁵³ but there was little informal influence of British diplomacy left to support them in Pakistan in these non-Commonwealth years, as the ‘most important transnational anchors of the late Cold War order’, supported by the US state, took centre-stage there (Engerman, Friedman, and McAlister 2021, 12).

Bangladesh and Afghanistan: ‘difficult to work [with] inherited imbalances … ’

The Geological Survey of Bangladesh (GSB) started as an attached department of the country’s Ministry of Petroleum & Mineral Resources, with the staff and facilities of the eastern division of the former GSP at Dacca. This inheritance was hardly enough for the requirements of a national organisation as it had been meant for a different set of objectives pre-1971, mirroring the west/east divergence within Pakistan.⁵⁴ Interestingly, unlike the GSI and the GSP, the GSB was not to explore petroleum, while mapping the country and its continental shelf area, and prospecting for mineral resources. The crucial search for petroleum and natural gas had hitherto been in private/foreign hands, which were nationalised in 1972 into PetroBangla (Wahid and Rawshan 2004). There was another government agency called the Oil and Gas Development Corporation and therefore the GSB was limited in its activities and authority. In 1974, thirty oil firms, most from the west, approached the government with their offshore drilling plans, as Dacca considered giving rights to six of them for a period of twenty years. Back in 1963, surveys had been conducted with Soviet assistance revealing possible oil-bearing structures in eight places, but with little follow-up by the ‘colonial regime’ of Pakistan.⁵⁵ Afterwards, ‘an ethnic separatist movement’ in the Chittagong hills tract would emerge, ‘primarily attributable to economic factors’ (Islam 2015, 12).

In such far-from-ideal conditions for collaboration, British officials were wary of letting the IGS undertake contractual work in Bangladesh. To give but one example, when, in 1980, the GSB asked for IGS experts for its Asian Development Bank funded five-year project on ‘accelerated exploration for mineral resources and modernization’, offering to pay $ 780,000 for ninety-eight months of consultancy, the IGS was willing,⁵⁶ only for the Overseas Development Aid/FCO to demur. Their position was that collaboration could only be considered ‘if the British Council were fully involved … as principal in the matter’, given the possibilities of misapprehensions, less-than-high-enough scientific standards, and costings.⁵⁷ No technical cooperation could be a loss-paying contract even if it was in the youngest South Asian member of the Commonwealth, although the same connection was then employed to involve a third-party (Netherlands) as a junior partner in the project.⁵⁸ Much later, the BGS, and other institutions like the UK Hydrographic Office, would be approached for rendering technical support in ‘charting the Bay of Bengal’ hydrocarbons (Jabed 2012, 751). Thereafter, however, a UNICEF/World Bank project for providing safe water by promoting shallow tubewells turned into ‘the largest mass poisoning of a population in history’, when it failed to assess the groundwater for arsenic; a task given to the BGS, which found itself defending a lawsuit in 2003 (Hossain 2017, 15).

On the other side of Pakistan was Afghanistan that, since 1947, had served as an arena of considerable foreign competition, before becoming a cockpit of the Cold War. Having fought four wars there in the preceding eighty years, Britain stayed away, and on the geological and mineral side, the most active participant was Soviet Russia, after ‘Kabul agreed in 1963 to future deliveries of natural gas [and] Moscow extended $ 39 million to fund exploration’ (Nunan 2016, 98). As early as 1956, a ‘Bloodless Battle for Afghanistan’ had begun in which ‘the Russians … build a road. The US replies with farm machinery. The Czechs offer railway coaches. The Swiss answer with the first geological survey ever made … the East Germans supply dynamos and the West Germans the hydro-project … ’⁵⁹ Meanwhile, Britain restricted itself to technical cooperation in coal, steel, salt, hydrology and rural industries. With the Soviet Union being Afghanistan’s largest aid donor, biggest export market, and the main source of military supplies and training, and with the Afghan government machinery being cumbersome, projects were laborious. In any case, as London knew well from as far back as 1839-1842, Afghanistan, except for Kabul, was ‘a very difficult country’ for outsiders.⁶⁰ From the 1870s, it had rivalled Russia in the wider central Asian region, in which the GSI’s scientific data had been a ‘strategic secret’ (Stafford 1989, 130). A century later, any IGS attempts at technical visits, geophysical surveys, and mines expedition were similarly contested. The Afghan government too made clear their preference for British ‘support in agricultural education’.⁶¹

In June 1978, the Soviet Union got a major oil and natural gas concession from the People’s Democratic Party’s government in Kabul,⁶² and the ODM-IGS were reduced to having their experts visit Pakistan and ‘keep an eye on Afghanistan from Islamabad’.⁶³ Any exploration in Afghanistan was now a ‘long-shot’,⁶⁴ and on 14 January 1980, within a fortnight of the Soviet forces’ entry, all British involvement there was suspended. It was after the departure of the Taliban from Kabul in 2002/03 that the BGS tried to help the near-decimated Afghanistan Geological Survey (AGS, est. 1968). Its 200 employees had been idle since 1989, but with the country’s rich deposits of minerals (between 1978–1989 Soviet scientists had mapped 21 metallogenic zones containing 1500 mineral deposits, including 73 million tons of coal reserves, and much copper–gold-chromite-iron ore-gemstones), and its highly productive northern petroleum province with its 300 million barrels oil reserve, future possibilities appeared ‘spectacular’ to the visiting British.⁶⁵ In February 2003, the new Afghan Minister of Mines and Industries requested the BGS to provide an expert in minerals to help ‘resurrect the sector … ’,⁶⁶ as Afghanistan became Britain’s biggest military engagement in the twenty-first century, and to ‘carry on [from] where the Russians left’.⁶⁷ However, when in 2010, more mineral deposits were discovered, including critical metals like lithium, the race for their acquisition began between ‘energy-hungry’ India, Pakistan and China. For the first and the last of this troika, this also amounted to a transition from being a ‘silent Samaritan’ to becoming a ‘resource stakeholder’ in Afghanistan, with ambitions for regional leadership (Sheraz 2014).

Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Nepal: ‘missed boat(s)’

The tropical island of Ceylon, slightly larger than Ireland, was a British Crown colony from 1802 to 1948 and became the Republic of Sri Lanka in 1972 (Jacob 1973). Separated from India by a channel only thirty-two kms wide, geologically it was a detached portion of the Deccan plateau, though not as well-endowed with metallic minerals. Consequently, nobody from the OGS visited it between 1948 and 1965, and the Ceylonese government reached out to Canada (under the Colombo Plan) for help in exploring its ‘mineral wealth’.⁶⁸ It was the Canadian government that financed an aerial photographic survey of the country (by one of the Hunting-Clan air-transport companies) in 1961/62, but it was only the south-west part of the country that was magnetically photographed. Even as Soviet Russia entered there to set up a steel mill in the mid-1960s, the IGS geologists did not feel that ‘Ceylon was likely to prove very rewarding [for] untapped mineral resources’,⁶⁹ except for items like graphite and dolomite whose low iron content made it useful as a ‘mineral filler’ or as an ‘ornamental marble’.⁷⁰ Eventually, in 1965, when there was a secondment of an American drilling engineer under a United Nations technical aid scheme, and the Ceylon Geological Survey enquired from the IGS whether it would give a geophysicist for supervision of some ongoing magnetic-resistivity work, the FCO was inclined to consider the request because of ‘the recent change of government [the Anglophile D. S. Senanayake defeating Sirimavo Bandaranaike and her Sinhalese nationalist party] and the presence of an efficient Geological Survey’.⁷¹ For the next fifteen years, the involvement of The British Council and the Overseas Development Ministry remained limited to a Colombo Plan application for a geophysicist and a magnetometer for mineral exploration from Trincomalee (east) to Hambantota (south), and a feasibility study, for the setting up of a phosphate fertiliser complex, carried out by Foster Wheeler Ltd. (Reading, Berkshire). This was another of those ‘colonial repetitions’ that thwarted ‘postcolonial possibilities’ in reading the geography of this island (Jazeel 2009). In the meantime, the Sri Lankan Geological Survey declined, and a consultancy report was commissioned by the IGS, which commented on it in strong words:

Sooner or later … by other donors if not by UK, something will have to be done about the GSSL. No government can continue to have a virtually ineffectual geological survey. Regardless of the number of ‘one-off’ consultancies and contracts … Sri Lanka government [must be made] aware of the ‘badly led, dispirited, demoralised, disorganised [and] paralysed by ineffectual bureaucracy’ … ⁷²

From the early-1980s, Sri Lanka’s civil war was starting to tell upon scientific projects as well, and the British High Commission in Colombo conveyed to London ‘the need to concentrate to a greater degree upon Sinhala areas of the country … prior to the next general election in 1983’.⁷³ This was in response to an IGS proposal for an extended hydrogeology project for the area between Puttalam and Kurunegala in the north-west. The situation was aggravated by external competition, as in 1981, a West German geologist was preferred to continuing a British secondment in the irrigation department to advise on geotechnical equipment.⁷⁴ But, the problem lay in London, where the Conservative government cancelled aid to the GSSL – and to Nepal – due to cuts in its budget from 1979. The High Commission in Colombo was informed that ‘priority was being given to agricultural and infrastructural sectors’, with ‘no consideration’ to the GSSL.⁷⁵ By 1982, 11 companies from countries like Australia, Singapore, and Thailand were carrying out mineral exploration in Sri Lanka, principally for gemstones, but also titanium, on an equal share basis with Colombo, leaving Britain behind.

On the other side of India lay the then-remote Himalayan kingdom of Nepal that had thwarted the English East India Company in 1816, becoming a protectorate (1816-1923) rather than a colony, and subsequently enjoyed a special relationship with Britain (Hussain 1970). Foreign involvement in the geological field there appeared in 1957, when Nepal had one cobalt mine and a quarry. The first on the scene was the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which loaned an expert with high precision surveying equipment. This work was taken over by the United Nations Technical Assistance Administration, and by America, which established a mission at Kathmandu for mineral exploration. Thereafter, a bureau of mines was set up with a laboratory, staffed by Nepalese graduates from Indian universities, who received further training in America. Here was yet another case that, in balancing ‘cooperation and exploitation’, confounded ‘distinctions between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in foreign relations’ (Black 2018, 7), as New Delhi sanctioned mapping projects, and the French contributed as, first limestone and alum, then lignite and mica, and later iron ore were discovered. Alluvial gold and lead–zinc too were reported by the GSI, while Shell Oil International was granted a concession for exploration over parts of the Himalayan foothills in 1962. But much of this work was concentrated in the south and east of the country, and the IGS eyed the possibilities of non-metallic minerals in the less-explored north and west.⁷⁶ Meanwhile, Kathmandu sought to ‘turn a dearth of funding opportunities into a surplus by strategically balancing the geopolitical interests of donors engaged in Cold War politics’ (Rankin et al. 2017, 59).

Nepal, however, remained more of a travelling destination, and the small Geological Survey of Nepal (GSN, est. 1967) tried to attract foreign experts without much success. By the late-1960s, it had two Soviet geologists doing some magnetometer work on mineralised areas under UN auspices, while a Far-East Economic Commission mission visited in spring 1970. The GSI’s presence in southern Nepal continued, but the Nepalese did not want to see it extended. The GSN sought advice and assistance of the IGS in ‘regional mapping, geophysics, and the training of technicians’, and it was a case of pushing at an open door, for there was much sympathy in the IGS for the ‘fascinating country, long on friendly terms with Britain’.⁷⁷ But it was not intent, rather the low-level industrial activity in Nepal, with most industries being an off-shoot of the agricultural sector that proved the hurdle. Nepal lacked basic infrastructure like roads, and in the mid-1970s, six countries as well as several UN agencies were helping build them,⁷⁸ even as Indian, Soviet and Italian scientists were seeking to survey the neighbouring Pamir-Himalayan mountain belt for minerals under the UNESCO’s geo-dynamic project.⁷⁹ There was an advisory visit to the country in May 1976 by the enterprising Dr. Hepworth to familiarise, assess, identify, and report on technical cooperation especially on a United Nations mineral exploration project that was to finish in two years’ time, but nothing matured apart from a contract of laboratory analyses of 4000 samples from there. When it was replaced in 1978 by another UN project with expatriates including ‘6 Turks, 3 Japanese [and] Australians’, Hepworth was forced to the unwelcome thought that the IGS had ‘missed this boat altogether’.⁸⁰ Throughout, these intentions and initiatives were framed as ‘apolitical … natural resource management’, which apparently knew no national boundaries but, in the process, they completed ‘crucial spadework for the expansion of capitalism’ in the hitherto secluded country (Black 2018, 7–8).

Burma/Myanmar: ‘serious political difficulties … ’

One boat that the institution did not miss was to Burma/Myanmar, despite declining British influence there through the 1950s (Foley 2010, 59–76). The first low-key interactions had come in 1968, twenty years after Burma’s independence from being a British possession since 1886, and these were to fit geophysical equipment in Burmese planes. It was followed by British geophysicists travelling to the country to give training courses and the Burmese making the journey in reverse for getting trained. In 1970, a 3-person team set out to map the Shan Plateau for lead/zinc, and set up AAS equipment/train local staff, and in 1971, another 3-person team went looking for tin/tungsten with a spectrograph. 1972 saw mapping/prospecting for mines (especially of copper), followed by advice on palaeontology and in 1976, £ 40,000 was put together on a 3-year programme for the Geological Survey and Exploration Corporation (GSEC) of Burma.⁸¹ The challenges with these projects were initially of two kinds: first, the political desire of the Burmese side to lead joint programmes, while the British side expected that this would be left to the IGS,⁸² and second, insurgency in the conflict and coup-prone country that made exploration in large areas dangerous.⁸³ With the Shan region ‘rich in oil, gems and silver’, but its people lacking ‘expertise, infrastructure and investment’ (Brown 1988, 64), it made for another peripheral community in the region.

A snippet of the former can be seen when Ba Than Haq, Professor of Geology at Rangoon University and vice-chairman of the government’s Geology, Petroleum and Mining Advisory Council, pointed out to the British embassy that while Canadian advisers were welcome in Burma because they seemed aware of the sort of problems that a developing country faced, British geologists were ‘too academic’, whereas the need was for ‘technicians … at home with unsophisticated methods … ’ These remarks led to the embassy expressing the worry that the IGS risked getting ‘a reputation for giving assistance and advice … not sufficiently down to earth … ’⁸⁴ This concern came to pass, when the embassy reported in late-1971 that the Burmese Ministry of Mines would henceforth receive aid from the UK for mineral development only on terms like ‘those applied to USSR, Germans and Japanese [i.e.,] capital aid, 50–50 shares, exploration followed by engineering and supply of equipment’.⁸⁵ Simultaneously, Japanese (copper/offshore drilling), West Germans (oil/minerals), and Soviet activities (mining) were expanding. The Japanese involvement, in particular, has been called a case of ‘engineering Asia’, in which the country moved from its own colonial construction of Burma in the 1940s to a post-colonial, Cold War discourse of ‘development’ (Moore 2018, 85–112). When the IGS got a chance to compete, Rangoon wanted it to survey the region north and east, on the understanding that it could follow ‘exploration with exploitation’, but the FCO considered it ‘intrinsically unacceptable’ because of security concerns, unless ‘private commercial interests might be interested’.⁸⁶ By 1972, the Japanese and the West Germans were going ahead with a loan, a grant, and an aid package that parcelled out offshore oil for the former, and offshore mineral for the latter,⁸⁷ even as London remained worried given … 

… serious difficulties politically speaking … problems of finance, security and organisation … worse here than anywhere … We feel we could not expand our operations … and that one could best build up “pole/pole” (does this smack too much of colonialism?). One is always being pressed to pour more into these countries, but [one should] limit assistance to what they are reasonably capable of … ⁸⁸

In 1976/77, as Rangoon was being nudged by the World Bank, the Burma Aid Consultative Group (led by Japan, West Germany, Canada and Australia) and their $ 200 million a year package for 5-years, to open up the country, the resumption of activities by the IGS ran into the ‘usual difficulties’ with the military and the ‘Kafka-esque bureaucracy’.⁸⁹ With the start of the 1980s, given its sluggish economy, social unrest and nationalisation, without compensation, of British assets, London limited its capital aid to Burma to £ 2 million per annum, and technical/maintenance programmes to less than half that amount. In terms of projects, agriculture/forestry/fisheries presented low-hanging fruits, but ‘the most clearly identified area’ in mining/mapping, remained a case of scope, and not success, for the IGS.⁹⁰

Conclusion

Despite, or perhaps because of, its imperial experience, Britain has treated South Asia as an ‘uneven, asymmetric, cluster’ (Jabed 2012, 726–727), and the BGS’s work reflects this. Its colonial, horizontal hooks across the region had to adapt to post-1947 bilateral, vertical trends partly, and ironically, because of the same colonial legacies of British policies. This fragmented institutions and diluted their presence among successor states and their other major international relations, America (Pakistan/Nepal), and Soviet Russia (India/Afghanistan), during the Cold War. Still, these colonial roots render ‘the analysis of relations between the UK and South Asia quite distinct’ (Jabed 2012, 728), and this can be seen in the experience of this institution. A proposed itinerary of Dr. C. R. Jones (IGS’s Regional Geologist for Asia) for advisory visits to Bangladesh-India-Nepal-Sri Lanka in February–March 1981 gives a good glimpse of this distinctiveness. Jones was in Bangladesh for three days discussing airborne magnetic survey, in India for two-and-half days talking on geological and laboratory work, in Nepal for three days on assistance with a United Nations Mineral Exploration Project, and in Sri Lanka for six days on collaboration with the department of irrigation. Here is an overlapping combination of colonial legacies, nationalist impulses and Cold War competition, and it is exemplified by employing the OGS/BGS as an instrument of Britain’s pre-1945 expansion and post-1945 contraction, to which it was not just connected, but also contributory to.

The ebb and flow of this work was increasingly shaped by the changing contours of regimes in the region. This political fluctuation in the field was compounded by perennial under-funding in Britain, which hampered successive institutional initiatives in competing with other international influences. The ‘positive rather than offensive’ propaganda approach of British institutions, led by the British Council (Byrne 2016, 132), was not enough in this politico-scientific arena, and by the early-1980s, they had slid down the scale of importance, investment, and impact. This, despite the fact that if ‘science was a central pillar of colonialism, the converse holds too’, and the post-colonial South Asian states’ ‘development model’ emerged from the ‘enduring beliefs’ of nineteenth century science (Philip 2004, 3–7). The ‘institutional and organizational’ context within which modern science was ‘domesticated’ in South Asia was from the late-18th to the mid-nineteenth century, as energy became ‘central’ to colonial economy (Raina 2017, 351). It remained so in the context of decolonisation, but this time for global, neo-colonial powers (Shutzer 2020). Further, this contest exacerbated internal ‘spatial inequalities’, as international capital-flow varied according to ‘political affiliations and potential zones of conflict on the political peripheries of the region’, and policies like non-alignment became ‘difficult to sustain’ (Kirk 1981, 196, 199).

The asymmetrical nature of BGS’s involvement across South Asia shows how once traditional mobility between the metropole and its colonies was no longer possible; individual exchanges and bilateral cooperation within the new Commonwealth became the terms of the trade. Soon, it was overtaken by the Cold War’s developmental agenda as, by 1951, the US AID plan for South Asia – costing $ 80 million, and combining seed, fertilisers, tubewells, fisheries, and geological surveys for India; fertilisers, road, trade, and geological surveys for Pakistan; coal for Afghanistan; agriculture and water surveys for Ceylon; and agriculture and mineral surveys for Nepal – was set to outmatch the Commonwealth Colombo Plan,⁹¹ dependent on its WWII-era sterling balances. Then there was the institutional web of whether this interaction fitted foreign or financial or cultural policies in Britain, and where did it fit in the political, national priorities of the South Asian states? This colonial-to-commonwealth cooperation amidst east–west competition thus made for adversarial programmes of knowledge generation, training exchange, and equipment loan. In sketching some of these, this article has surveyed the constrained workings of a colonial institution within techno-national frameworks after decolonisation and during the Cold War, at a time when politics peculiarly influenced technology, from inside and outside the territorial spread that was South Asia.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rakesh Ankit

Rakesh Ankit is lecturer in History & International Politics at Loughborough University. He is the author of India in the Interregnum: Interim Government, September 1946-August 1947 (OUP, 2019) and The Kashmir Conflict: From Empire to the Cold War, 1945-66 (Routledge, 2016).

Notes

1 23 March 1950, The Times of India (hereafter TOI), p. 10.

2 20 April 1953, TOI, p. 1.

3 9 December 1962, Roe (DD, OGS) to Hill, OGS/DC/34/1/1, BGS Archives, Keyworth.

4 8–17 October 1947, Memorandum and inter-departmental meeting on the oil position in India, File No. 424/47-Public, National Archives of India, New Delhi.

5 29 August 1949, TOI, p. 5, and 29 December 1950, TOI, p. 5.

6 7 March 1968, Note of a meeting with Dr. F. Joubin (UNDP adviser on minerals, India), OGS/DC/34/1/1.

7 9 December 1962, Roe to Hill, OGS/DC/34/1/1.

8 29 April 1963, Shaw (OGS) to Murthy (GSI), 1006/61.

9 25 December 1952, TOI, p. 8; 23 November 1954, TOI, p. 11, and 22 October 1955, TOI, p. 1 & 9.

10 7 December 1955, TOI, p. 1; 19 January 1956, TOI, p. 6; 21 & 24 April 1956, TOI, p. 11 & 5; 22 May & 11 June 1956, TOI, p. 5 & 5; 12 August 1956, TOI, p. 1; 27 March 1957, TOI, p. 9; 15 November 1959, TOI, p. 9; 28 September 1960, TOI, p. 6, and 11 June 1963, TOI, p. 8.

11 7 April 1965, TOI, p. 9; 15 October 1965, TOI, p. 4, and 24 May 1966, TOI, p. 9.

12 16–22 February 1966, Menon-Shaw correspondence, 1006/61.

13 21 July 1970, Minutes of a meeting between FCO, ODM, Pallister (IGS) and visiting Indians on technical collaboration and assistance between the GSI and the IGS, 1006/61.

14 26 October 1966, TOI, p. 6, and 21 October 1967, TOI, p. 1.

15 10 November 1968, TOI, p. 1.

16 9 September 1970, TOI, p. 1; 1 October 1972, TOI, p. 1, and 2 March 1973, TOI, p. 11.

17 30 November 1970, Note of a meeting with personnel from Huntings Geology and Geophysics Ltd., 1006/61.

18 3 August 1971, Pallister (IGS) to ODA, SA 205/281/01.

19 21 January 1971, Morrice James to Anthony Part, and 23 September 1971, Note by Valentine/Beeby (CBI), FCO 37/836, The National Archives, Kew.

20 19 March 1971, Solly Zuckerman to Edward Heath, FCO 37/836.

21 27 April 1971, Note by Sutherland (SAD), FCO 37/836.

22 17 November 1971, Answer to unstarred question no. 412, FCO 37/836.

23 Betwa Groundwater Project, 1010/7/A IGS (Overseas Division).

24 10 December 1976, Note by Finance Department on Betwa Groundwater Scheme, 1010/7/A.

25 19 February 1976, Hepworth (IGS) to DG-GSI, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

26 10 September 1976, British High Commission, New Delhi to South Asia Department (SAD), Ministry of Overseas Development, London, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

27 9 April 1978, TOI, p. 8.

28 18 December 1976, Colloquium on ‘role of national geological surveys’, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

29 10 September 1976, Note by Wilson on Hepworth’s report, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

30 5 March 1977, Note on Hepworth’s report, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

31 25 January 1977, Hepworth to Murthy, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

32 21 February 1977, Bleackley (IGS) to Scott (ODM), IGS/OD/34/1/1.

33 6 May 1977, Varadan (DG-GSI) to Hepworth, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

34 12 July 1977, Hepworth to Bleackley on future cooper cooperation, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

35 17–29 April 1979, Note on a visit to India for British aid to the petroleum industry, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

36 2 February 1977, TOI, p. 9.

37 7 December 1980, TOI, p. SM6.

38 11 September 1980, Note by Overseas Development Administration, IGS/OD/34/1/1.

39 31 January 1947, TOI, p. 5.

40 20 December 1948, TOI, p. 4.

41 25 March 1952, TOI, p. 5.

42 28 June 1956, TOI, p. 6.

43 12 July 1957, TOI, p. 7.

44 16 October 1962, Note by Roe of a trip to Pakistan, File No. 1006/59/a (OGS/DC/59/1/1).

45 Ibid.

46 25 January–7 February 1963, Note by Andrew Cohen on his visit to Pakistan on Colombo Plan works and Commonwealth Educational Co-operation Scheme, File No. 1006/59/a (OGS/DC/59/1/1).

47 4 July 1961, TOI, p. 6.

48 2 June 1970, Hobden (BHC, Rawalpindi) to Baxter (SAD, Ministry of Overseas Development), File No. 1006/59/a (OGS/DC/59/1/1).

49 25 September 1974, Pallister to Newman (BE, Islamabad), File No. 1006/59/a (OGS/DC/59/1/1).

50 1976, Ministry of Overseas Development, Country Policy Paper-Pakistan, IGS/OD/59/1/2.

51 24 March 1983, Fullerton (BE, Islamabad) to Warren (SAD-ODA), File No. 1006/59/a (OGS/DC/59/1/1).

52 31 March 1983, Peter Streams (Karachi) to ODA (London), File No. 1006/59/a (OGS/DC/59/1/1).

53 15 April 1983, Jones (Regional Geologist Asia and the M-E) to Warren (SAD-ODA), File No. 1006/59/a (OGS/DC/59/1/1).

54 May 1978, ‘The Task Ahead’, Government of Bangladesh paper, IGS/OD/4A/2/1.

55 24 January 1974, TOI, p. 4.

56 20 February 1980, GSB to IGS, and 3 March 1980, IGS to GSB, IGS/OD/4A/2/2.

57 18 April 1980, SAD to IGS, IGS/OD/4A/2/2.

58 29 September 1980, Minutes of the meeting held to discuss joint submission by IGS, and the Netherlands Geological Survey in Bangladesh, IGS/OD/4A/2/2.

59 18 March 1956, TOI, p. 8.

60 1977, Ministry of Overseas Development, Country Policy Paper-Afghanistan, IGS/OD/1/1/1.

61 25 April 1977, MOD to IGS, IGS/OD/1/1/1.

62 27 June 1978, Memorandum from Kabul, IGS/OD/1/1/1.

63 13 April 1978, Hepworth (Head of Asia, IGS) to Evans (Middle-East and Mediterranean Department, ODM), IGS/OD/1/1/1.

64 4 April 1978, Hepworth to Evans, IGS/OD/1/1/1.

65 2002–2003, International Development House of Commons Committee/DFID report on Afghanistan: The Transition from Humanitarian Relief to Reconstruction and Development Assistance, IGS/OD/1/1/1.

66 9/10 January-3 February 2003, correspondence between Kabul and Keyworth, IGS/OD/1/1/1.

67 29 November 2002, email from Kabul to Keyworth, IGS/OD/1/1/1.

68 6 December 1954, TOI, p. 5.

69 5 June 1965, Anderson (British High Commission, Colombo) to Cahill (MOD, London) on request under Colombo Plan of an adviser from the OGS, IGS/OD/16/1/1.

70 17 August 1979, Bain to Hepworth, OGS/DC/16/1/1.

71 20 April 1965, Allen to Shaw (OGS), IGS/OD/16/1/1.

72 12 July 1979, Hepworth (IGS) to Cook (South-East Asia Department, ODA), and 17 July 1979, Hepworth to Herath (Director of Scientific Affairs, Geological Survey of Sri Lanka), OGS/DC/16/1/1.

73 7 January 1981, Colombo to London, OGS/DC/16/1/1.

74 27 January 1981, Martin Culshaw (Colombo) to Jones (IGS), and 3 February 1981, Jones to Cratchley (Engineering Geology Unit), OGS/DC/16/1/1.

75 March 1981, OGS/DC/16/1/1.

76 6 August 1964, Note on the mineral potential of Nepal by Bleackley, IGS/OD/56/1/1.

77 27 January 1970, Wilson to Director (IGS), IGS/OD/56/1/1.

78 30 August 1975, TOI, p. 4.

79 3 July 1975, TOI, p. 8.

80 5 May 1978, Hepworth (IGS) to Birrell (Southeast Asia Department, ODM), IGS/OD/56/1/1.

81 15 June 1976, History of IGS involvement (produced for the meeting of Director, IGS, with the Burmese minister of mines), IGS/OD/12/1/7.

82 2 January 1970, Bleackley (IGS) to Pallister, IGS/OD/12/1/1.

83 20 April 1970, Overseas Division (FCO) to Rangoon, IGS/OD/12/1/1.

84 25 June 1971, Rangoon to London, IGS/OD/12/1/2.

85 3 September 1971, Rangoon to London, IGS/OD/12/1/3.

86 22 September 1971, Gilbert to Bleackley (IGS), IGS/OD/12/1/4.

87 28 January 1972, Rangoon to FCO (London), IGS/OD/12/1/5.

88 23 March 1973, Pallister to Fozzard (UN), IGS/OD/12/1/6.

89 30 March 1977, Bleackley (IGS) to Burrnschweiler (PetroBangla, Dacca), IGS/OD/12/1/7.

90 1979/1980, Country Policy Paper-Burma, IGS/OD/12/1/7.

91 27 July 1951, TOI, p. 4.