Character and potential assessment is a capability severely deficient in the sawdust caesars strutting the stage of Indian industry. Despite all their claims to professionalism, the great majority of promotions and fancy designations in India Inc continue to be awarded on considerations of nepotism, kinship, connections and sycophancy. In a society where top political appointments are made on similar considerations, this is perhaps inevitable. But the price of nepotism paid by companies’ shareholders and society is heavy.
A narrative — of which your editor has first-hand personal experience — illustrating the validity of this observation is provided by the amazing history of the late Alok Jagdish Saxena, the promoter-chairman of Mumbai-based Elder Pharmaceuticals Ltd who passed on in October last year. Way back in the 1970s when your editor was a junior executive in Rallis India Ltd, Saxena was parachuted into the company’s middle management following the merger of Tata Fisons Ltd, a UK-based pesticides and pharmaceuticals company with Rallis in 1972. But although a competent executive, Saxena was given no room to ideate or innovate by the Tata Fison division general manager, Dr. S. Agarwala, a clueless medical practitioner, who by a mysterious alchemy was promoted to the position of director of the pharma division of Rallis India. Frustrated, Saxena put in his papers, and against all expert advice promoted Elder Pharmaceuticals in 1989. Under his stewardship the company prospered mightily to record a sales turnover of Rs.1,650 crore in 2012-13. And recently Elder Pharma was acquired by Torrent Pharma for a humungous Rs.2,004 crore.
Nor is this the only instance of Agarwala’s poor judgement. According to him your correspondent was unqualified to write the product brochures of the company and was demoted, triggering another resignation. Within a year I established Business India as the country’s most widely read finance and commerce magazine which arguably catalysed the process of liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy. But for each such story that ended well, there must be thousands of lives destroyed by the cardboard cut-outs of India Inc, lions of domestic industry but bleating lost lambs in the newly emergent global marketplace.
Intellectual leap requirement
Despite the astonishing success of the Aam Admi (‘common man’) Party in the Delhi state assembly election being intimately connected with localised civic issues — electricity, water supply, municipal corruption, ration cards etc — in other parts of the country these civic issues which impact the daily lives of citizens, receive scant attention. This is certainly true of the once spic-n-span garden city of Bangalore.
Today, this charming city once renowned for its well-maintained lakes and green parks is choked with road traffic and domestic and industrial waste at every street corner, the outcome of slapdash development planning by Karnataka’s notoriously corrupt establishment and somnambulant Planning Commission, who have miserably failed to develop counter-magnet cities in Karnataka (pop. 62 million). As a result Bangalore’s population has spiralled from 1 million in 1960 to almost 9 million. Despite its flourishing hi-tech IT industry, the municipal corporation is lumbered with iron-age technology. It’s quite common to witness bare-bodied civic maintenance employees repairing roads and laying drainage pipes using nothing more than primitive spades, shovels and crowbars, and manual ‘scavengers’ being pushed down manholes to unclog gaseous, overflowing drainage pipes by a cabal of unqualified contractors who are also dumping civic waste in surrounding rural hamlets.
Neither the state government nor the municipal corporation of this IT hub have been able to break the grip of the contractors cabal and upgrade civic maintenance technology available off the shelf to convert waste into fertiliser and electricity. On this and other civic reform issues, the Bangalore Political Action Committee (BPAC), a club of noveaux riche industry leaders which was launched with great fanfare last summer, seems to have also gone into deep hibernation.
The unheeded manifesto of the Bangalore-based Children First Party of India offers the solution of decentralising civic administration to the ward level by resurrecting the 74th Amendment to the Constitution (see www.childrenfirst.in). But that’s too great a leap of intellect for BPAC and the city’s smug middle class, perpetually in party mode.
Investigation tribunal challenge
The atrocities inflicted upon poor Muslims in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzzafarnagar district in early September by Jat Hindu members and/or sympathisers of the RSS/BJP, which has forced them to seek refuge in 16 squalid relief camps where over 30 children have died in the cold wave sweeping north India, are an indelible stain on Indian democracy and the establishment.
Details of the unspeakable crimes visited upon women and children of the minority community by Jat lumpen elements are too gruesome to recount here. But while the UP government has paid out Rs.5 lakh as arbitrary compensation to several dispossessed families, no success has been recorded in the arrest and arraignment of the perpetrators of these heinous crimes. The popular belief is that the state government took its time to despatch police to the affected villages of the district so that UP’s Muslims would get a taste of things to come under a BJP government, if the ruling Samajwadi Party is voted out of office. Meanwhile the BJP and Congress are hesitant about condemning criminals from the Jat community for fear of losing their votes in the general election this summer.
Given the calculated inaction of mainstream political parties, engaged in callous electoral maths, the onus of investigating these abhorrent crimes has devolved upon right-thinking members of society. I propose the establish-ment of a Citizens Investigation Tribunal chaired by two retired Supreme or high court judges to record the testimony of riot victims, identify the criminals and pass recommendatory sentences. To fund the tribunal, EducationWorld pledges to contribute Rs.100,000 conditional upon 29 other individual or corporate citizens contributing equal amounts to a trust to be constituted for this purpose.
Notice needs to be served upon the political establishment that citizens have alternatives to futile lamentation and breast-beating.