I’ve been at Adani Power Maharashtra Limited, Tirora as a project intern for seven days now, and there’s been significant additions to my experiences.

Allow me to provide some facts and statistics:

  • APML, Tirora is a 3.3GW capacity power plant which uses about 10,000 tonnes of coal everyday when operated at maximum capacity.
  • Greenest power plant in Asia, and gardening-and-maintenance is the second largest employer section here.
  • Quite a donnish behaviour on security, including forcing the people to wear helmets and safety shoes, which is actually a good thing.
  • As a project intern here, I needed to get permission for roaming around with my laptop and mobile phone.

Well, that is boring. Let me share the interesting stuff.



Accommodation

I was provided with great accommodation facilities, which included this shared room in the guest house. The Room


The cleaning staff is supposed to clean the rooms and make the bed everyday, ridding me of the daily chores that elicit all forms of laziness.

I knew I was going to have a great time here, because I found out that the reservoir lake used for the plant’s water requirements is visible from my room, gracing me with a daily morning view like this: Lake View Imagine waking upto this everyday



The Orientation

In summary, the orientation confirmed that the guys here are

  • obsessed with security
  • focus a lot on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibilities)
  • love greenery and nature
  • are devotees to the 5S methodology

During the orientation, I had the fortune of meeting Dr. Vijay Gandhewar, who has been a professor in Mechanical Engineering for 17 years, after which he decided to move on to a job here.
I was fascinated by his lenient attendance policy, which he openly declared by saying, “I know how you guys work. If I call you here everyday, you’ll work for 6 hours everyday, but if I leave you to your rooms, you will work for 12 hours.”
And this was actually great, I could comfortably stay in my room with the air-conditioner blasting 22 degrees while the temperature outside was as high as 46 degrees.
The only restriction I had was that I should be carrying my helmet and wearing safety shoes while on work.
Fair Enough.



The Plant

The campus is insanely huge.
The transformers, the turbines, the generators, the pumps, the electrical wiring, everything is insanely huge. The scale is humbling.
For reference, regular pumps here have a flow rate of 22.22 cubic metres per second!
To a guy like me, who interfaces delicate electronics which smoke at 10mA and can get destroyed due to static electricity, seeing a transformer almost double in size of his hostel room was numbing.
I remember being speechless while on my first field trip inside the power plant.
Everything I looked at screamed at me the beauty of Electronics, the scalability, the delicacy, the intricacy. If only someone could play Sigur Ros in the background with a recording of me looking at everything in slow motion, I would have looked like a man who had just discovered the missionary position.

In spite of all this, I grew immune to the 1600-acre-engineering-beauty exponentially as each day passed.



The Project

Due to some corporate restrictions, I cannot fully disclose my project, but it is based on developing a semi-intelligent HMI for automating several pumps.
The project is based on Android, and looking at the extremely ordered intricacies of Android Studio made me quite afraid of whether I’ll be able to complete the project.
I must state here that I have had absolutely no idea of Android programming before this, and that the last time I had written Java code was in class 10th for some basic calculator.
Quite mortified by the scale of the project, I proposed a timeline that I hoped I would be able to follow without disappointing anyone.
But what ended up happening was that I finished on 28th May what I had scheduled for 15th June.
And so, I realised I had 17 days to idle around before anyone could begin to question me on what I was doing. Today is the 2nd day, 15 more to go!

Flock Along Lake This is what I found while exploring this place for 2 days. This flock turns up at this spot every evening and leaves by dusk.

Well, I cannot idle around for 15 days, and I’ve decided to just dive head-on into this project, because I’m beginning to get comfortable with Android Studio’s environment. It’s not just the Java that troubles me, but Android’s lingo, like understanding Gradle files and why they need to be perfectly configured, or manifest files, or Contexts and common macros, or an idle emulator consuming 1.5 GBs of RAM, that take some time getting used to.



Impressions

Although I appreciate the ordered life of employees that work here, I detest it too.
I can never expect myself to look at 3 huge screens to monitor for faults. A corporation that doesn’t delve into new flows, new methodologies, new technology and research will not be able to deliver redeeming tasks. I understand that sitting in a cosy chair comfortably while looking at screens and sipping tea might define perfect jobs for some people, but not me.
I don’t think I can work in a corporation which has no research interests.
I’d honestly prefer repairing vintage electronic devices at a local store over such kind of work.

But aren’t circumstances brutally coercive?