LAHORE, Aug 11: The Pakistan Mint is maintaining its impeccable excellence with the same machinery and meticulous work routine given to it by the British rulers of India while establishing it in Lahore before the partition. The reason is not the attention paid to it by any ruler in the country but a lack thereof.

There is a need to modernise the factory to catch up with the world which is far ahead of the supposed imagination of those who had built it. But still it produces coins the same old way without any failure with the machines that look like masterpieces of a museum. The difference is that these artifacts still give live performance with the same designer accuracy under the trained fingers of a fast depleting force of craftsmen.

The 66-acre walled mint is located on GT Road just ahead of Mughal-era Shalamar Gardens. Its gates are closed and manned by security guards who are stern and trained to disallow unauthorised entry. From GT Road it looks like an unimportant structure but once inside, it unfolds its importance for the national coffers and the treasure of history it is maintaining thanks to the blessing of a lack of patronage.

Originally, the British India was maintaining His Majesty’s Mint in Alipur, Calcutta (Now Kolkata). The Britons nevertheless shifted it to its present site in Lahore in 1942 after Japan pounded Burma and Calcutta during the World War II. The mint was to stay in safer Lahore for five years. It started functioning in September 1943 and crossed the deadline due to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.

The then safer site is now closer to the Pak-India Wagah Border. It has witnessed two wars between the two countries and many threats of the clash since 1947. Perhaps no one in Pakistan thinks, unlike the Britons did, that the proximity may be harmful for the money-minting apparatus.

The staff estimates age of the equipment to be 100 years and thinks that it was first installed in Cairo and then shifted to Calcutta. Amazingly, the equipment including the immaculate huge scales is still in perfect running condition.

Named Pakistan Mint after the creation of the country, it used to produce coins of the denomination of Re 1, eight annas (athani), four annas (chawani), two annas (dwani), one anna, takka and one paisa. The number was reduced to only five rupees, two rupees and one rupee a decade ago.

The mint stopped producing five-rupee coins after the Gen Musharraf-led establishment preferred five-rupee notes to them. The notes have now been withdrawn and the State Bank is expected to start using the five-rupee coins stock made earlier for at least 10 years.

Now, the mint is producing aluminium Rs2 and Re 1 coins. Previously the Rs2 coins were made of copper. But the metal was changed after the copper prices escalated and private parties began using the coins as a cheap manufacturing raw material. Such coins too reportedly turned into bullets in private ordnance factories in the tribal areas.

The minting process is simple though methodological. Metal is melt into ingots which are rolled for softening and obtaining the desired thickness. Following this, blanks are obtained and the waste is again melted. The blanks are forwarded for edge making and finally for stamping.

The coins are checked for accuracy, counted by a machine and packed. Each bundle is sealed and stocked in a coffer by the mint, bullion and the State Bank staff.

The mint also produces proof and commemorative coins, civil and military awards and medals, postal stamps and seals, year punches, embossing machines, shields, tokens and many other things representing the state of Pakistan. Another task is to melt, refine and convert into standard bars of gold confiscated by different agencies. The mint once used to make weights and measures.

The entire designing and everything else is done by the mint craftsmen whose strength is fast depleting because of a ban on recruitment. The strength once was 2,000 workers. But the number at present is just 752.

The mint is under the Federal Finance Division but workers don’t remember any secretary ever visiting it to assess the condition of the money-producing men and material.

Mint Master Misbahul Haq says a British company, Royal Mint, has recently been selected for preparing a feasibility report of the modernisation of the mint. It is expected to submit its recommendations in the next six to eight months.

He and other staff including the union leader do feel the need for modernising the mint, saying it also needs to catch up with the rest of the world. “We need to introduce electronic weights and measures, and gold marking sections,” an official said.

“The coins we produce are 20 per cent of the total circulated money in Pakistan whereas the ratio in almost all other countries is 50-50. We also need to increase the ratio,” he says while gloating “producing coins with hands and century-old machinery is nothing short of a miracle.”