Jamshedpur is an hour's flight by Dakota. It is a town which has grown up around steel, engineering, locomotive and associated industries. Many of the factories here, as in other Parts of India, result from partnerships with foreign firms and are as modern and efficient as their counterparts anywhere in the world, but extreme shortage of foreign exchange creates many problems for them. An Indian gave me an interesting summary of the basic economic problems, some of which stem from the success of new industries which need materials from abroad but are not yet competitive enough to earn foreign exchange by exporting. He started this exposition by saying: "We Indians are a very sentimental people - over money!"
It had been a hot, dusty day and I spent the evening until departure time, at the small local hotel. I had taken a room there but was rather glad I would not have to sleep in it, and my colleague and I sat on the verandah, driven nearly distracted by the endless "ponk, ponk, ponk, ponk" of a bird in a tree on the other side of the road. By half-past-eleven, my friend and I had established ourselves in our two-berth sleeper. I had never travelled by overnight train before and had no standard of comparison, but this was a First Class, air-conditioned coach, and though the beds were hard, it was clean and comfortable. After a look at the bathroom at the end of the corridor I decided that I would prefer to stay dirty until I reached my hotel in the morning. My companion seemed to sleep well, but I dozed fitfully and with the dawn watched our progress through fields and villages ghostly in the waist-high mist. Howrah Station, Calcutta, in the early morning is squalid and depressing. It is not easy to get off the train for the Hordes of tip-hungry, red-jerseyed porters fighting to get at the luggage. One porter was stealing a march on his fellows by going in through a window head first. We emerged from the station, picking our way through recumbent Indians, sleeping wherever there was space to lie down. A short wait in a queue for a taxi and by half-past seven I was back in my hotel room. It seemed like home, and my gaunt, staring "boy" like an old friend.