Founded in 1980 by Dr Amarnath Gupta, Premier Explosives has several firsts to its credit. It claims to be the first small scale private enterprise to produce commercial explosives in India. It was the first private company to get the DRDO contract to manufacture propellants for the Agni and Aakash missiles. Today, this Rs111-crore company with its 1152-people team is the first company in the world to have developed the technology to produce NHN detonators, considered much safer, than the more commonly used ASA detonators on a commercial scale.

I wake up around 5.45am and go for a walk every morning. After that, I read newspaper and get ready for office. Morning is when I get some of my best ideas. In fact, it was during a newspaper reading session when I was thinking about Premier that I decided on my company logo. I had seen a headline in the Indian Express about the US launching a rocket into space the day I got our company registered. I decided we’d have the rocket as our logo. At that time, I had founded Premier as a producer of commercial explosives for mining. That was my expertise. I never knew then that I’d end up making propellants for India’s defence industry—the Aakash and Agni missiles. The rocket logo was a premonition, almost. 

My office is very close to my home and I usually reach there by 9.30am. The first thing I do is check my e-mails and make a list of what needs to be done that day. Most of my time is spent in meetings with my people. Having worked in the technical department of Indian Explosives Limited for seven years, my focus at Premier continues to be on R&D. I visit our factory once or twice a week. When I am there, I usually get a heads up on what problems our department heads may be facing and give them my inputs. Over the years, a big lesson I’ve learnt is that not only do you need to make fair decisions when you are dealing with people, it’s important to be perceived as fair also. I work hard to involve people in the decision making process—to discuss things with operators, supervisors and officers’ working in all our departments to get their views. This way, people don’t feel as if it is only the CMD’s decision. Decisions tend to be more balanced, and seen to be fair when they are collaborative. If you do that well, the implementation of the decision is faster and more effective. 

Effective collaboration and communication become all the more important in an explosives business because we have a lot of buildings and people spread across locations. The many buildings help to spread out explosives operation, for the simple safety reason that if there is an accident in one building, it won’t affect people who are not part of the operation. We also split the explosives in each building into smaller portions so that damage is minimised. But despite these precautions, a deadly accident took place at our factory in Peddakandukuru in July last year which changed everything. I was in Serbia attending an explosives conference, at the time when I got a call from Srinivasa Rao, our director of production, that two of our workers had died in an explosion and six others had been injured. We also lost production of about 30 million detonators in that financial year. When I came back to India after two days, we conducted an internal inquiry to find out why and how the incident had taken place. 

As all other manufacturers in India and abroad, Premier also was using ASA or lead Azide, lead Styphnate and Aluminium powder, as the primary explosive in the production of detonators. We had taken all safety measures in the manufacturing process using ASA, such as training our personnel on its proper use, and deploying remote controls and devices like hydraulic power for driving the reactors. But one of the workers had inadvertently dropped a box containing wet Lead Azide, which detonated the content and materials lying on his working table. As the walls of the cubicle and the heavy 15cm RCC roof of the reactor section collapsed, another worker in the next cubicle got crushed under the wall and six others got injured. While it is a known fact in the industry that ASA is a highly sensitive component, it has been used in the absence of other reliable alternatives around the world to produce detonators. But after this incident, things changed. Those two gentlemen had worked with us for 20 years. We couldn’t afford to lose any of our team members. So when our production heads sat together to discuss our plan of action, they said that we should repair the damages and get back on production. But I put my foot down. We had been working on using an alternative molecule called NHN or Nickel Hydrazine Nitrate to replace ASA in the manufacturing process for about three to four years but we hadn’t tasted success on that front yet. Actually, this chemical has only been tested at lab scale and no one in the world has used it on a commercial scale. But we took it up as a challenge. I told my team that we’d be building a new facility, not for the production of ASA detonators, but for NHN detonators. There were a lot of reservations from our R&D team because they weren’t ready with the product. But I told that that constructing a new facility will take around two to three months and that’s  when I want the finished product. 

There were two challenges before our team—the synthesis of NHN and the production of detonators with NHN as primer. While we had started synthesising NHN using the technology from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Trivandrum, we found that the output was very low on sensitivity. It required consolidation at a high pressure for getting detonated and the technology couldn’t have been used as it is. So our R&D team continued its trails to improve the sensitivity of the product and developed a method to manufacture a 5kg batch of detonators. The final formula is totally different from what our company had started with. As for the production of detonators, we had conducted several trials to make a reliable detonator with NHN in place of ASA by changing process parameters such as the minimum quantity of NHN to detonate PETN, the secondary charge, the consolidation pressure and the dwell time. And I am proud to say that my team didn’t let me down. They perfected the process of manufacturing all kinds of detonators with the new component NHN in the allocated time, without any major changes to our present infrastructure. I spent all my knowledge and time in monitoring the product and this innovative initiative consumed a lot of our time. But it was worth it. While we had to forego some revenue in 2012-13, production came back to normal levels in the first two months of FY 2013-14. 

We are the first company in the world to use the more safe nhn as a primer charge.

Today, we have a product which is much safer and technically better than the one we were using earlier. NHN assures safety in production to both human lives and physical assets. NHN detonators are also safer to operate. Plus, as these detonators have no lead content and generate fewer effluents, they are less harmful to the environment. For the technically inclined, NHN is also known to have a higher Velocity of Detonation compared to other primary explosives under optimum conditions. Premier’s innovativeness lies in ensuring those optimum conditions are met in the production of detonators with NHN. Since we have started using NHN as a primer charge in our detonators, the company has produced more than 20 million detonators. It’s heartening to know that we are the first company in the world to have accomplished this enormous feat and we have already applied for a national and global patent for the same.