Page 40 - Gujar Mal Modi

posed a problem which had no easy solution. As if Providence came to his help

at this juncture, one day when Mr. Modi was having his afternoon nap, he saw
the figure of a Mahatma (an ascetic) in his dream. At first the figure was unclear

and hazy. But gradually it became clearer and started talking to him. The Mahat-
ma suggested to him that if a certain amount of fresh milk of lime was added to

the sugarcane juice, it would solve all his problems. Mr. Modi woke up in aston-
ishment.

He had never met anyone resembling the figure which he had seen in the dream.

Yet the figure appeared to be familiar and re-assuring. He got up and began to
recollect what he had seen in the dream. The sub-conscious in him helped him

to recollect all that the Mahatma had said in the dream. He called for the Dutch
chemist and related to him his astonishing dream. The Dutch expert laughed at

the idea of using milk of lime and would not test it. But the young Gujarmal was
so convinced about the correctness of the suggestion in the dream that he de-

cided to try it. He told the Dutch expert to quit and entrusted the task of working
on the idea to Mr. Desraj Narula, who was then working as manufacturing chem-

ist in the factory.

The novel idea suggested by him proved miraculous, for the very next day Mr.

Narula came running with the happy news that production in the factory had
gone up from 400 bags to about 500 bags per day after the new idea had been

put to test. Chemical analysis, done later at different laboratories, revealed that
the new process discovered by Mr. Modi had the effect of reversing the process

which was responsible for the low recovery. What had been happening so far
was that when sugar cane juice was kept for a certain period of time, it became

sour and acidic and this inverted the sucrose content in the juice and turned it
into molasses. The addition of fresh milk of lime had the effect of checking the

inversion thereby yielding higher quantities of sugar. Today, it is customary to
use this process in the sugar industry, but in the 1930s when the sugar industry

in India was still in its infancy, this discovery was of major importance, for it gave
an amazing boost to the production of sugar in the country. This achievement is

all the more remarkable as it came from a person who did not have any formal
technical knowledge of the sugar industry.

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