Prof Dasgupta said around 300 pages were given to the department in the first phase and 110 of them have been translated by now. He said: “The pile of documents is huge. We will be given another pile to translate, and the process will take at least six months.”

Julie Thomas, a student translating the material said: “We have translated many works, but this is different: it is more technical. The geologists had jotted down their day to day notes about drilling the wells and everyday we started on a new beginning, translating the thoughts of the geologists. The notes chronicle the process of drilling 6,000 feet deep oil wells; the results achieved; the layers they came across such as Oligocene and Eocene, and the kind of drilling in use at that time.”

Prof Dasgupta added: “It is not just that. It also includes the process characteristic and the solutions in the drilling process, the depth, the specific gravity and the base priming.”