A short history of acetylene in India from imported carbide in 1928 and no Indian carbide before 1952 to the standards and rules that govern the trade today

India came to acetylene late and as a customer. For the first half of the twentieth century every kilogram of calcium carbide burned in an Indian lamp or torch was imported, and the country made none before 1952. The family business behind Kamrup Industrial Gases, started in 1947, is therefore older than the Indian carbide industry itself. This page sets out the few published datapoints on acetylene in India from the international record, and the standards and rules that have been built since, so that the history can be told from sources rather than from memory.

The first reliable picture comes from the international carbide statistics for about 1928, assembled by Taussig in Die Industrie des Kalziumkarbids (Halle and Vienna, 1930) and, for fuel acetylene, by Rosemberg in the bulletin of the International Acetylene Commission (Paris, 1929), as compiled by S. A. Miller (1965). The table divides the world into producing countries and "importing countries with no indigenous manufacture". India is in the second group, using about 3,000 tonnes of carbide a year for fuel acetylene — level with China, ahead of Denmark, Venezuela and the Dutch West Indies, behind Britain at 42,000 tonnes. "Fuel acetylene" in those figures covers lighting as well as welding and cutting, and excludes chemicals. World carbide production at the time was about 1.6 million tonnes, though contemporary estimates range from 1.0 to 1.7 million.

At roughly 285 litres of gas per kilogram — the international minimum yield of the period — 3,000 tonnes of carbide is of the order of 850,000 m³ of acetylene a year for the whole country, for lighting as well as welding and cutting.

The family industrial-gas business behind KIGL was founded in 1947. As recorded by S. A. Miller (1965), no calcium carbide was made in India before 1952; production then grew slowly, to about 4,000 tonnes in 1959, 10,000 in 1960 and 20,000 in 1961, and the producers he lists by the early 1960s include Birla Jute's furnace at Birlapur in West Bengal. Until then a dissolved acetylene filler in India was a converter of imported raw material, exposed to shipping and exchange-rate risk on its main input.

The next datapoint is in the international carbide table for 1948, 1953 and 1957, drawn from von Haken (Chemische Industrie, 1953), Klöckner (1959) and Lang (Journal du Four Électrique, 1961), as compiled by S. A. Miller (1965). Against India for 1953 it records a single note: used 1,000 tonnes of dissolved acetylene.

India in 1953 used dissolved acetylene at about Argentina's level and about one percent of the United States. The table also shows dissolved acetylene tonnages rising in every country it lists through the 1950s, even as the chemical industry's use of acetylene was about to fall away — the subject of is acetylene obsolete?.

Indian Standards for acetylene began with the product and moved outward to the equipment:

The committee that writes the cylinder, generator and pipeline standards has carried three names — EDC 16 in the 1970s, HMD 16 in the 1990s and MED 16 today — which is worth knowing when reading old certificates. The full set is described on the dissolved acetylene standards page.

The statutory frame moved alongside. IS 308's own packing clause still refers to Government of India Notification M-1268(1) of 9 January 1939 for cylinder design. The Gas Cylinder Rules of 1940 are cited by standards still current today (IS 3710:1978 and IS 8775:1978); they were replaced by the 1981 Rules, the 2004 Rules and finally the Gas Cylinders Rules 2016, notified on 22 November 2016, which repealed the 2004 Rules. In 1983 notification GSR 625(E) declared acetylene an explosive when liquid, under pressure or mixed with air or oxygen, so that only dissolved acetylene in an approved porous-mass cylinder is outside that definition. The licensing authority, once the Department of Explosives under the Chief Controller of Explosives, is now PESO, with acetylene licensing centralised at Nagpur, as described on the PESO licence page.

Indigenous carbide brought an engineering problem with it. A survey by the British Oxygen Company of carbide from 19 manufacturers in 12 countries, as compiled by S. A. Miller (1965), found a world-normal range of 150 to 310 vpm phosphine in the generated gas, and Indian carbide at 800 to 1,000 vpm — among the highest recorded. On those figures a purifier running on Indian carbide of that period carried several times the phosphine duty of one on typical European carbide; whether today's carbide is similar is a matter for measurement, not assumption. The detail is on the phosphine in Indian carbide page.

There is one thing Indian acetylene history does not have: a published investigation of an acetylene accident. PESO publishes rules, forms and procedures but no accident bulletins, and state factory inquiries are not generally published. That is an absence in the public record, not evidence of a safety record, and it means no claim about Indian incident rates can be supported either way. Indian practice has drawn its lessons from investigated cases in Britain and the United States, and from the experience of manufacturers who audit plants in service.