The Workshop

The workshop and hub of the project was centrally located in Kolar, the largest town in the district. The demanding terrain and continuous workload presented a challenge. The project's overloaded Jeep pickups bounced and shook on their way to the well sites that were spread over an 8,000 square kilometer area. They were laden with rock drills, air hoses, drill rods, fuel cans, half a dozen crew members, and towing diesel driven compressors that weighed in at over a ton.We discovered quickly that in order to keep the drilling equipment operating with a minimum of interruption under arduous conditions far from the workshop, it would require regular field maintenance and prompt repairs. Along with the main responsibility of servicing and repairing the project’s equipment, the workshop demonstrated that it was economically sensible to prevent a breakdown rather than taking a machine out of service and repairing it after it had occurred. I was a young apprentice the first time I heard the term "preventive maintenance”: If you didn't fix yesterday’s problem today, you're going to have to fix it when it’s twice as big tomorrow. Pearls of workshop wisdom, but if India 89’s volunteers were going to get their co-workers to understand that principle, they would have to work at changing a mindset that was shaped through generations of limited technical experience and scant resources.