Lost in the Wonderland of an Indian PSU

Graphic Image of Agitating Workers - AI-generated

My tenure in the Organisation and Methods function exposed me to the entire range of end-to-end processes and workflows in the Integrated Steel Plant ecosystem. The projects and the teams I associated with curated my critical thinking, analytical skills, problem-solving and negotiation ability.

One of the risks of working in a large organisation is developing tunnel vision. We get used to a fragmented approach rather than cultivating a holistic perspective of issues and possibilities. The ability to see the big picture and appreciate the impact of our actions on the larger canvas is critical to professional development.

In smaller and medium-sized organisations, opportunities for cross-functional and multi-tasking assignments would come one’s way. However, in large organisations, we tend to regress to a compartmentalised work pattern where we are more concerned with our assigned tasks and are less mindful of the holistic outcomes. I was fortunate to work on projects that offered comprehensive visibility of corporate priorities and challenges.

Tunnel vision vs. helicopter vision differentiates functional specialisation and general management responsibilities. As our career path progresses, we will increasingly need general management capabilities.  What better platform can one get to grow general management competence than opportunities to work on cross-functional projects and multi-dimensional assignments?

As an O&M professional, I was called upon to handle multiple assignments at a time. This meant that I had to shift my domain focus from one functional area to another depending on the scope and nature of the projects assigned. This experience helped me to look at the organization holistically. Agility, or the ability to refocus on new and changing priorities smoothly, is a critical competence in leadership development.

When I had to juggle a variety of assignments, I had never even heard of the term ‘agility’. In management, jargons are born, grow into clichés and fall off yielding way to newer fads!

Since we had a client-specific working style, most of our assignments involved discussions with senior management, including Functional Heads to understand the problems and the context, ‘sell’ the solutions and get client buy-in.

I was cruising along in my internal consulting assignments, when one day, my immediate manager asked me to go and meet the Personnel Manager. You can imagine the anxiety and apprehensions that such a call could trigger in a junior executive just a couple of years into the job. Often, superiors summoned junior colleagues for critiquing, counselling or ‘censuring’; appreciation and motivational pep talks were rare those days.  

I was at the office of the Personnel Manager at the appointed time.  After pleasantries and a few words to put me at ease, he told me, “In our marketing and sales department, which, as you know, is a centralised corporate function, they have issues with manpower rationalisation, job evaluation and grading. Since you are professionally trained in O&M and have had reasonable experience by now, we recommend you for a lateral transfer to the Personnel Department of the Central Marketing Organization. You will be based initially in Kolkata and they need you soon. Are you okay with the change?”.

Having been in the hinterland cut off from urban glitz, I grasped the opportunity to move to a metro city. Also, Kolkata was a place that I had always associated with all-time greats like Tagore, Bose, Vivekananda and Satyajit Ray, to recollect a few of the many icons of our generation.

In the 1970s, Kolkata was close to the heart of most Kerala youth. If you did not read the Malayalam translation of Bengali novels, if Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen were not your favourite cinema greats, you were not considered progressive enough in Kerala.

My only exposure to Kolkata till then was a hurried weekend trip from Rourkela along with a batchmate during our early training days. The option to move out of the stale and stereo-typed township to a teeming urban centre was appealing to me.

Things moved fast and the release order from Bhilai Steel Plant to join Kolkata’s Central Marketing Organization was in my hand within a week.  Since the change was on the demand of the organization, my seniority and ranking were protected. I would have lost my seniority and started afresh on transfer to the new unit if I had opted for the change myself.

Lack of personnel mobility and absence of rotational postings to provide inter-functional exposure were pitfalls of public sector HR policies. Rigidity and bureaucracy in HR decisions were a major drag on the corporate culture and talent development of public enterprises. They still are, by and large.

As I reported to the Head of Personnel in the CMO of SAIL, I could not miss the highly charged-up and belligerent work culture in the organization. I was briefed about an ongoing agitation by workers and contract labour at our Shipping and Transport Depot in the Vizag Port in Andhra Pradesh. That had blown up over the past months into a serious blockade of operations.

Ships that came to discharge import cargo of steel products, as well as coal for our steel plants, were being held to ransom by the staff. The workers at the behest of the Unions were demanding assured overtime payment irrespective of whether operationally needed or not; the Unions decided that manpower was inadequate and that their promotional avenues were insufficient. In the 1970s and into the early 80s, the PSUs were dictated by Trade Union high-handedness and mostly meek senior managers who regularly solicited political favours leveraging the clout of the union leadership would be too mild and yielding in the handling of union demands.  

The Steel industry at the national level had at least a semblance of an established joint negotiation forum as a bipartite mechanism but at the unit level, the local leaders of unions created and nurtured their fiefdom.  

CMO was headquartered in Kolkata, so the messy and vociferous union bellicosity of Bengal echoed across the SAIL establishments, brimming over to other locations around the country.  Durgapur Steel Plant, the Alloy Steel Plant also located at Durgapur were hotbeds of trade union arrogance and frequent hooliganism.

The Joint Negotiation Committee for Steel Industry which covered the entire steel sector remained a soft-footed, goody-goody set-up. All the national trade unions were represented in the committee and the discussions mainly revolved around the periodic nationwide wage revision for the Iron and Steel Industry.

Those days, in the public sector, negotiations meant management yielding to the union pressures and demands; it was surprising how little management demanded as quid pro quo from the Unions. Productivity bargaining was still in its infancy.  

On the shop floors, mines and in the commercial stockyards and dockside locations, management was an inverted pyramid where the unions commanded, and the officers meekly surrendered. There was no ownership and no fear of punishment or loss of remuneration for managerial inefficiency. Stories of shop floor indiscipline and flash strikes especially from Durgapur reverberated off and on.

Personnel management in the public sector was a sort of amphibian persona. While the management saw the function basically as firefighting to quell flare-ups of labour unrest and the unions expected HR to play the role of lobbyists for Union demands and for driving compromise solutions from the management. As a result of the role confusion, neither employees nor managers took HR as a serious contributor to the organization’s strategic operations.  

I remember being despatched to the volatile Vizag shipping and transport yard of SAIL where the unions were holding shipments, offloading and logistics to ransom. On reaching the hotspot, I was surprised when the local union satrap called on me at night with a bottle of rum and an eerie smile that was difficult to decipher for a newcomer. I had to politely tell him that I was a teetotaller and I feigned a severe headache to seek an excuse from their dinner and drinks invite.

The major union was CITU-affiliated but there was also a strong INTUC-aligned union. In Vizag, the non-CITU faction was holding sway then, I was told. I understood that inter-union rivalry and one-upmanship were the real reasons why the deadlock was often difficult to resolve. On most occasions, the management had to cave in and accept the unreasonable demands of the unions because the higher management was most often keen to soft-pedal the issues.

What an irony that the public sector, which meant the assets were owned by the ordinary Indians collectively, was allowed to rot because no one dared to assert managerial authority and objective assessment of situations. Passing the buck and ducking the responsibility were the twin mantras on which the uneasy equilibrium and semblance of industrial peace rested.

I was brought in as an expert on Work Study and Work Measurement to give the unions a convincing proposal to scientifically assess the manpower requirements and work structuring. I was to present a plan of manpower rationalisation, deployment and staff grading that would make the unions agree to a negotiated solution. I was still fresh and admittedly naïve too.

I got a taste of the tentativeness and adhocism of public sector management within a couple of days of my landing amid the chaos in Vizag.

One early morning, as I was preparing to meet the union leaders and present an initial plan of rationalisation, I got a call from the Personnel Manager saying that the top management had sorted out the matter by talking to the union bigwigs at Delhi. I could return to Kolkata forthwith. There was no need for any exercise or discussions.

Later, this was a pattern I got used to and I admittedly became comfortable with it. More than achieving results and trying new solutions, all that the PSUs needed was to create a show as if professional discussions were setting the agenda and arriving at solutions. In reality, backroom manoeuvres and ‘cashew-nut diplomacy’ would keep the ball rolling. “Chalti ka Naam Gaadi”! 

On moving to the Central Marketing Unit, once the volatile union-management confrontations mellowed down albeit temporarily, I was absorbed into the Human Resources cadre. Thus, my quasi-technical role came to an end and I became a run-of-the-mill administrator, handling the routine operations of what in the PSU parlance was called ‘Establishment’.

I had a deep distaste for routine administration tasks, and I felt deprived of my creative and consultative work schedules and agenda.

I remembered a story one of the senior managers who taught us in the training sessions told. There was a donkey who was routinely beaten, scolded and made to starve by his owner, a dhobi. One day at the ghat, a fellow donkey asked him, “Why don’t you run away to freedom instead of suffering the humiliation, day in and day out”? The donkey retorted in a lamenting tone, “These tough days would pass, and I would emerge to a new dawn sometime”. As a PSU executive with a long and winding journey ahead, I also felt, “Apna time ayega!”.

Over the next year and more, my rendezvous with Kolkata carried on. The office was mundane. The weather was sultry. For over ten hours a day on average, we had load-shedding, the peculiar phenomenon when the Electricity network switched off supplies arbitrarily to rebalance load and manage to ration power, unmindful of the loss of productivity and the hardship to people.

Yet, despite all the hassles, I must admit that Kolkata had a spell on me, and the smell and charm of Kolkata grew in me. It triggered my creative writing instincts. I published my first poem in our house magazine, Fairlie Place. The poem titled, “Oh Kolkata” won the appreciation of many, especially my Bengali colleagues.

Here is the poem reproduced for you. You can also read this in the collection of my poems published under the title, “Sparks Beneath the Ashes” (2024)

Oh, Kolkata,

You are me

And l am you

In the pale twilight darkness,

As I roam through your crowded, filthy streets

I feel the familiar unpleasant smell,

that I am quite used to on my errant wanderings

through the dark corridors of my inner self.

When I engage myself

in the vain task of deciphering

The Gitas and Upanishads, written in wrinkles,

on the faces that I run into in the busy Chowringhee,

I am, in fact, searching for my own identity,

not only yours.

From the footpath on the Howrah Bridge,

when I look at the muddy river down below,

it seems to me, not as Kolkata’s eternal tears,

but as the flood of innumerable streams,

that rushed down my cheeks through the Ages.

My Calcutta is not the array of skyscrapers,

built on garbage-filled tanks, ·

nor the sleepy mansions lost in nostalgic dreams

of the past;

no, not even the never-ending stream of vehicles.

To me you are more than physical, that manifests

in the feeble smile of a tired rickshaw wallah,

and in the hope that lingers in the sullen eyes

of the wayside vendor.

That smile and that hope are immortal,

through them you too

and through you me:

because we are one,

My Kolkata,

You and l.