The transition from student days to work life is the first major breakout in life cycle maturity. A mix of excitement about novel experiences and anxiety about unfamiliar environments would peel off our veneer of naivety.
Being amidst new people and situations presents challenges, conflicts and opportunities. We are slowly introduced to the corporate culture at the new workplace. We learn to walk the career path, much the same way children take their first steps, fumbling, getting hurt and collecting the courage to move on. Every day is a new experience and an opportunity to discover a new you!
India is a multinational country as someone put it succinctly. The first time I heard this phrase was from the late leftist leader, EMS Namboodiripad. Later, when I expanded this concept beyond the narrow constraints of political dialect in which the veteran leader would have spoken, I realised the larger cultural significance of the term. India is vast, diverse and an agglomeration of sub-cultures and labyrinthine identities. Like Europe, India comprises multiple regional perspectives coalescing into an overarching, loose-knit composite culture.
If the American Republic can be called the United States, then truly India deserves to be called the United States of India. Such is the range of diversity that Indianness is a nebulous idea for the larger citizenry.
As I opened my eyes and ears to the sound and light of the larger India, I felt, at once, proud and intimidated by the vast collage of colours, sounds and chaos around. An orderly India seemed an illusory conjecture!
As trainees in our pre-placement orientation program, we were accommodated in the Graduate Engineers’ Hostel where many technical trainees were already staying for longer-duration induction programs.
The morning after we arrived, in the wee hours, there was a sudden flurry of action on the campus. Being our first day on the campus, we were rudely shocked to be awakened by the bristle and hustle.
I saw Emergency’s huge hands right in front of my eyes. Uniformed troops equipped with machine guns, revolvers and rifles, were seen rushing up the stairs of our adjacent block. There were murmurs heard among the motley gathering of panic-stricken fellow trainees and onlookers comprising a few hostel staff and casual labourers.
“A few guys staying in the corner rooms over there are being rounded up, possibly because they are suspected of having leftist, Maoist leanings. They are a threat to national security and to the disciple of the campus”. Someone blabbered.
Soon thereafter we saw four of the trainees, all in their twenties, handcuffed and with their heads hooded being escorted away by the policemen and shoved into the van waiting at the portico. We would later realise that we wouldn’t hear about them for a long time as they might be incarcerated in some remote high-security jail. For the first time as a young Indian, I saw glimpses of a Russian, Chinese or North Korean junta raj in our own “Sare Jahan se Acha” motherland!
The few days of Emergency regimen and the emotional stress built up through stories carried, rumours and gossip exchanged in private and a recap of my reading on the dreaded regimes of the world made me wonder whether the country was indeed entering a dark hole, possibly never to re-emerge into the easy-going routines we were used to for years.
Away from home and lost among strangers, I felt a nagging aloofness to the immediate context, staring at the encircling blankness. I couldn’t help thinking of Hitler’s Germany and the hapless residents who would have endured much harsher conditions than what was unfolding before my eyes. In the face of uncertainty and adversities, it was comforting to think of those worse off than us! Comparisons do make us happy or unhappy depending on our frame of mind.
The gloom and suspense thinned out and we hurried to our training session. There was a mix of welcome speeches and keynote addresses by the Plant General Manager and Heads of Departments. We were described as the ‘chosen flower from the garden of our magnificent land of diversity called India’. Even as novices, eulogy, even hollow words that meant nothing, sounded sweet and uplifting!
The seniors who had joined our previous batches, fresh from their academic life then, had by now reached middle to senior levels in the company. They gave us pep talks and made us feel how prestigious it was to belong to the select club of future leaders to take our country forward.
A nerd-looking batchmate raised his hand as he would probably have done in his lecture classes in college, “A Question, sir!”. The HR Director intervened, “Boys and girls, here you are an executive as much as we all are. No ‘Sir’ here, and such honorific salutations. Address us by name. Add ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ as the prefix if you want. Go ahead and ask your question.”
“What position can I reasonably aspire for by the end of my career”, the youngster with an aspirational glow in his eyes asked.
The Chairman of the Company who had flown in for an interaction with the new batch of management trainees took the mic and said in a slow, measured voice, “Well, gentlemen, you can hope to occupy my chair one day. Of course, only one of you would hopefully lead the company as the Executive Chairman. Some of you would be Directors and some would move on to other organisations for similar positions. You are the ones who would make your career. Through hard work, commitment, consistency and by producing results for the organization”.
We were invited for an evening get-together at the prestigious Executive Club in the Steel Township. We would be introduced to the high and mighty in the company and would also get a feel of the corporate club culture for the first time. The club life was one of the elitist perquisites not accessible to the lower-down staff.
In India in the 1970s, anything foreign was considered special, only accessible to either the powerful or the high-heeled ones. Imported liquor was a privileged offering of the Club.
We were reminded by our course mentor that we should behave like good boys and practice regulation and restraint in eating and drinking. “Manners and etiquette are indicators of your executive personality. This is your first chance to impress your seniors. Faltering in the first step would be a false start and the scars would be hard to erase. So better behave”, the stern XLRI alumnus was a stickler for decorum and believed in treating trainees like regimental soldiers of the front line.
As we trickled down to the club hall, we noticed the interest and curiosity that we as a cohort had generated in the township community.
We were careful not to show overenthusiasm for the bar table. We remembered the patronising advice of our mentor. After a sobering taste of the high-end spirit, we settled down to dinner. For the first time, I was exposed to the unspoken rule of corporate blabbering.
Humour is an integral part of dinner gatherings. That is fine. But there are subtle rules of etiquette on jokes and gossip. One of the privileges of being the Boss is that others are expected to laugh aloud, clap and appreciate every time you narrate an anecdote or crack a joke. But the assemblage should not attempt to add to the fun by improvising or crafting jokes and anecdotes on their own. Oh Boy, hierarchy extends its nagging hold on party behaviours and utterances too!
All our integrated steel plants were mammoth establishments set up in remote and mostly tribal, desolate locations. The townships were virtual islands of prosperity lost in the vast ocean of deprived hinterland. The community was often desperate for visitors, news and mail from outside.
India was a typical third-world country with both physical and social infrastructure at rudimentary levels. The Steel Townships in the Public Sector- at Bhilai (then in MP, now in the young state carved out as Chhattisgarh), Rourkela (Odisha), Durgapur (West Bengal) and the later addition at Bokaro (then in Bihar, now delineated and christened as Jharkhand) – were loosely modelled on the Soviet concept of industrial towns.
The only integrated Steel Plant in the private sector was Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, which was much older than the PSU plants and to be honest was much better and professionally managed. There was another legacy Private Sector Steel Mill in Burnpur (Asansol) in WB. The Public Sector subsequently took over the plant at Burnpur and it was presented to us as a case study of mismanaged private enterprises.
As I learnt more of the intricacies of the Public Sector Steel industry and its governance, as an inquisitive, and partly cynical explorer of business realities, I started wondering whether at all Governments could do business the way the private sector could!
Capital investment whether in the Public Sector or in the Private Sector essentially comprises of social capital. It is the larger wealth of the public that gets invested either as a loan, equity, grant or subsidy. Almost all private sector projects in India are largely funded by public sector financial institutions. Hence when the net worth erodes in the case of many mismanaged PSUs it is the society and our economy that are the losers.
When Nehru set out to build the new industrial infrastructure of the nascent Nation, he rightly identified the Steel Sector as a strategic focus for investment and capacity build-up. India had an abundance of Coal (though of mediocre quality and high in ash content) and Iron Ore mostly in the Eastern Region of the country. The PM on the advice of technical experts and the Planning Commission chose the locations in the Eastern States to establish greenfield integrated Steel Mills.
The most critical challenge for our planners was to get the technology transfer for advanced, patented processes and equipment for the new plants.
The World was already highly polarised into the West and the Rest after the Second World War. Or, rather into the Capitalist First World, the Socialist Second World and the less developed nations grouped loosely as the Third World. The third world economies were deficient in capital for investment, owned very little technology and infrastructure and their human development was inadequate to kick start any large project on their own without expertise from outside.
Added to these multiple deficiencies, India lacked an intellectual property regime of global standards to reassure the potential suppliers of proprietary technologies. The ideological baggage of being a virtual Soviet ally was a drag on our accessing the developed world’s advanced technologies.
Nehru’s avowed alignment with Soviet and socialist models deterred Western economies and companies from sharing technologies and including us in trade partnerships.
When India scouted for technologies for our planned Steel Plants in the 1950s to 70s, we met with resistance or outright reluctance from the Western world. Being our colonial masters of the past, Britain came forward to provide technology support and expertise for one of the three plants proposed by us and became the strategic partner for India’s first public sector steel plant at Durgapur in West Bengal.
Russia (the composite USSR then), the close ally and Nehruvian India’s socialist role model, offered technology and expertise to build the plant at Bhilai. West Germany, the technology leader of the time, expressed willingness to provide us with advanced technology and expert support to build by far the most advanced of our three initial steel complexes.
As an entry-level executive in the Indian steel Industry, I was particularly impressed by the professionalism and high level of business integrity and ethics that West Germany demonstrated by offering brand-new technology and comprehensive support to India to launch what was then a world-class steel complex.
The rumours were that the USSR grossly underrated its plant capacity and passed on significant slack capacity to India so that the performance of the Bhilai Steel Plant appeared quite remarkable. However, the real process and product efficiency of the plant were believed by many industry experts to be sub-par.
As India’s ambition to build temples of growth grew, our Government wanted to tap US technology and comprehensive support to build another massive plant at Bokaro, which had the advantage of huge iron ore and coal deposits nearby. However, the Americans, being staunch promoters of corporate capitalism and private investments across the globe, are believed to have insisted that the partner from the US would be from the private sector and not the State-run US Steel. They wanted a huge foray into India post-independence to spur the growth and diversification of a potentially robust and sustainable private sector. These ideas were anathema to Nehru’s avowed love and romantic obsession to keep all investments of a strategic nature “at the commanding heights of the economy” in the monolithic grip of the State sector.
Thus, the attempt to get the American Steel industry on board in our pursuit of massive industrialisation came a cropper. The Russians rushed in to fill the gap and that was how two of the largest Indian steel plants came to bear the stamp of Soviet technology and work practices.
The Public Sector expansion in the first three decades of Independence caused lethargy, inefficiency, bureaucracy, nepotism and an inward-looking, pat-on-the-back culture of mediocracy.
As a nation, we have paid a heavy price in terms of lagging global competitiveness because of this dogmatic policy paralysis. China while being a declared Socialist (Communist) nation stole a march over India in various parameters of productivity, global trade dominance and massive eradication of poverty. In retrospect, it was the Public Sector drag that added significantly to India’s laggard economic positioning on the world stage.
Durgapur Steel Plant over the years became a hotbed of trade union rivalry and perpetuated a laid-back work culture and bureaucratic indifference. The plant quickly turned into the sick child of India’s public-sector steel industry.
Bhilai and Bokaro created a model of mediocre but steadily functioning establishments. Rourkela with its focus on flat products, with state-of-the-art facilities became the star kid of the Stat sector steel plants. Tata Steel became the benchmark for efficiency, productivity and profitability. In addition, compared to Public Sector peers, Tata Steel emerged as the employer with much better human resources practices and consequently exemplary employee commitment and loyalty.
In 1977, when George Fernandes, the Socialist Minister of Steel in India’s rainbow coalition that scored an upset victory over Indira Gandhi’s Congress in the post-emergency elections attempted to nationalise Tata Steel, the entire workforce and all the Trade Unions agitated against such a step against a private corporate giant that workers, unions and the general public loved and respected. What a great testimony that Tata Steel earned in those troubling times.
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