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"Imagine you are an engineering consultant and want to know if the contractor of your newly set up plant has supplied equipment as per your specification. How would you test it?” asks Dara Rupa, chairman and managing director of Industrial Marine and Oilfield Services (India) Private Limited (IMOS). "You would need specialized testing services of the kind that we provide,” he answers. "Or, when you are a shipping company and you want to know if your vessels are seaworthy, or if you need to replace certain equipment; or if you are a buyer of large equipment that stores pressurized fluids.”

 

 

 

Explaining that non destructive testing (NDT) refers to techniques used to test the properties of a material without causing damage, Rupa highlights that this can be achieved through ultrasonic thickness gauging, dye penetration, magnetic particle inspection or radiography among other sophisticated methods. In an interview with Parsiana at his office in central Bombay on February 2, 2017, Rupa explains that NDT may be required to be carried out before a piece of equipment or plant is put to use for the first time, and also during its life cycle. Insurance companies need to "test the health” of large equipment before they write any new policies. According to Rupa, NDT services "are required in most industries, all over the world.”
IMOS employs 30 technicians, including four graduate engineers, who use sophisticated equipment to serve their clients in hydro, thermal and nuclear power stations, the shipping industry, oilfields, aerospace and petrochemical plants. The company works with clients in India and in the Middle East. The duration of a test project would depend on the complexity of the equipment to be tested and could vary from 15 days to three months. Technicians need to perform the testing within the standards laid down by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Indian Society of Non-Destructive Testing.  
Rupa explains that for a contract to check seaworthiness of a vessel, his technicians would need to take over 50,000 readings to look out for corrosion in different parts of the ship and all its various pieces of machinery using equipment like oscilloscopes. With in-house developed software to record and analyze the data, clients can be provided with three dimensional and cross-sectional views of various pieces of equipment, making it visually easy for owners to detect corrosion, and to determine which pieces of equipment need replacement, and which are okay for use.

 

 

 

 

IMOS’s technicians use a robotic ultrasonic flaw detector that can "climb” up to 30 ft along the wall of, say, a pressure vessel and send electronic signals to a base unit which can be recorded and analyzed by a technician, thereby doing away with the need to build scaffolding around a tall piece of equipment. Rupa displays another piece of equipment — a rapid motion scanner that helps the technicians map corroded areas in ferrous structures like storage tanks and pipelines. "It is an ocean, everyone has a chance to swim … but only those with experience and technology such as ours can make a success of it,” says Rupa, of the market for NDT.
A science graduate from Bombay University’s 1967 batch, Rupa shares that his first job was that of a laboratory assistant in Hindustan Unilever. He then joined a marine survey company — Ericson and Richard — where he had his first exposure to ultrasonic thickness measurement on ships. He furthered his interest in the field with jobs in Iran and Singapore where he gained experience in the area of inspection of oil field equipment. Radiography and further ultrasonic courses in the UK and USA followed, says Rupa, who serves on the advisory panel of the Indian Society of Non-Destructive Testing, and of the Ultrasonic Society of India.
Having set up IMOS in 1980, he converted the partnership firm to a private limited company in 1983. He reminisces that the first ever job undertaken by IMOS was for the testing of the equipment at Tata Power’s 500 MV plant at Trombay. In 2002, "after eight years of research in biorhythms,” he earned his doctorate in science from the Open International University of Complementary Medicine in Kuttalam, Tamil Nadu, which is affiliated to a university in Kazakhstan.  
Parsis do not like to do this kind of work, as it is hard labor, according to Rupa. "It is a dirty job … my team works in temperatures of 45-50°C,” he elaborates, with a diagram of a ship’s hull, how his team members often need to crawl through narrow spaces on all fours, to take readings. Wife Aban who had a long career in accounting with the Taj Group and now works as a consultant to the hotel, helps IMOS with its accounting strategies. Son Bomi is a sales executive with the Taj in Dubai, while daughter Anahita Jilla works at the Taj in Hyderabad! Rupa functions as a trustee of the Zoroastrian College and holds its founder Dr Meher Master-Moos in high regard. "What worked once upon a time may not hold good for all times … we need to be practical … Zoroaster had not said no to interfaith marriages,” he says. A fan of how Zoroastrianism is practiced overseas, Rupa says, "They are more observant of the true aspects of the religion ("paak parehjgaar chhè”) in, say, St Petersburg, as compared to here in India.”