Sahara: The Untold Story; Tamal Bandyopadhyay; Jaico Books; Rs.450; Pages 344
AT THE TIME OF writing this review of Tamal Bandyopadhyay’s much awaited and deeply- researched book, Subrata Roy, the high-profile founder and ‘managing worker’ of the Sahara Group of 479 companies, is lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail. Roy’s offence is that Sahara failed to comply with a Supreme Court order dated August 31, 2012 to refund a sum of Rs.24,029 crore to 29.6 million investors who had deposited the said sum with it by purchasing its OFCD (optional fully convertible debentures) since 2009.
Earlier, in 2010, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) had prohibited two group companies — Sahara India Real Estate Corp. Ltd (SIRECL) and Sahara Housing Investment Corp. Ltd (SHICL) — from issuing OFCDs on grounds that the identities of the purchasers of these debentures were shrouded in mystery and that the companies had indiscriminately accepted deposits without adhering to mandatory KYC (know your customers) norms.
Sahara’s defence was that the majority of purchasers were poor and often illiterate peasants uncovered by the organised (including public sector) banks, who provided rudimentary addresses. Moreover the OFCDs were purchased by people associated with one or more of Sahara’s 479 companies, and therefore were private placements of securities, and as such beyond the purview of SEBI whose jurisdiction is restricted to publicly listed shares and securities.
Behind Roy’s arrest and incarceration for contempt of the apex court — significantly, not on any criminal charge — is a story of the relentless hounding of a creative, even if corny, over-the-top entrepreneur with a genius for resource mobilisation by the country’s regulations-obsessed rather than outcomes-driven bureaucratic establishment which has transformed an inherently entrepreneurial society into a nation which ranks #138 on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index.
The author is strictly neutral in setting out this narrative of the rise and fall of Subrata Roy, the engineer of this massive conglomerate with claimed assets of Rs.152,000 crore including a land bank of 36,000 acres. But it’s quite clear that Roy has aroused the resentment and suspicion of bureaucrats who control the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the country’s 27 rules-driven and red-tape ensnarled public sector banks for doing what they have conspicuously failed to do: provide depository and credit services to the 60 percent bottom-of-the-pyramid population. Quite the contrary, establishment bureaucrats believe that the Sahara parivar is a massive money laundering operation for the undeclared ill-gotten gains of politicians and anti-socials.
The most enlightening chapter of this facts-filled narrative which surprisingly lacks a subject index thus sharply reducing its value as a reference text, is perhaps Annexure I which traces the history of ‘shadow banking’. According to government babus non-banking chit funds, housing finance, and consumer goods finance companies taking deposits and investing them, constitute a grave threat to millions of illiterate and ignorant citizens who could be left high and dry by their promoters. Consequently, one after the other their operations have been curbed or banned by RBI in its capacity as the regulator of the country’s financial system.
With all these deposit schemes severely circumscribed, if not banned, in 1987 Roy promoted a new deposits-taking entity classified as Residuary Non-banking Finance Companies (RNBCs) by RBI. On December 3, 1998, Sahara India Financial Corp. Ltd (SIFL) was registered as an RNBC by the apex bank. But when it proved too successful despite being obliged to invest 80 percent of its deposits in government bonds and securities as per the directives of RBI, the screws began to be tightened on SIFL. In March 2008, SIFL was asked to reduce its deposits liability and two months later to stop accepting fresh deposits.
With the apex bank in effect shutting down the RNBC (SIFL), Roy turned his attention to developing his real estate business with Sahara Prime City Ltd proposing to raise funds through an IPO and another group company Sahara Real Estate Corp. Ltd (SRECL) by issuing optional fully convertible debentures (OFCDs) to investors. The first company was denied permission to make its IPO and SRECL and SHICL (Sahara Housing Investment Corp. Ltd) were served notices by SEBI, to disclose details of the OFCDs issued by them.
Sahara’s defence is that SEBI had no locus standi as SRECL and SHICL are not listed companies and that the OFCDs issued by them were placed privately to investors in Sahara Group companies. If at all it was answerable, it is to the registrar of companies.
This defence was rejected by SEBI, SAT (Securities Appeal Tribunal) and the Supreme Court on August 12, 2012 which ordered SRECL and SCHIL to refund Rs.24,029 crore to 29.6 million investors. After protracted negotiations, part-payments, appeals and after Roy presented a scheme to pay off OFCD investors, the Supreme Court directed him to produce title deeds of properties, bank statements and ledger records. On February 28 Roy was arrested for failure to comply with the court’s order.
The manner in which the author explains the SEBI/RBI pursuit and downfall of Roy and Sahara in great detail, makes it quite clear that he has a pro-establishment bias. His praise for the grey bureaucrats of the RBI and SEBI — several of whom he lauds as finance professionals of great wisdom and insight, overlooking the pathetic condition of the country’s public sector banks awash with NPAs, and over half the population excluded from the organised banking system — is unwarranted.
The plain truth is that RBI, SEBI and even the Supreme Court have disregarded Roy’s fundamental right to carry on a business, trade or profession guaranteed by Article 19 (1) (g) of the Constitution and transferred the onus of discharging the burden of proof from the State to the accused (Roy). Admittedly there is something fishy about the seeming ease with which Roy is able to mobilise thousands of crores from investors with suspicious names and addresses. But under the common law system prevalent in India, the State (government) is obliged to prosecute individuals suspected of criminal offences such as fraud, forgery, cheating etc prior to depriving them of their fundamental right to carry on a business, trade or profession.
Quite clearly the country’s rag-tag police, investigative agencies and moth-eaten judiciary don’t have the capability to discharge this duty. But that’s no excuse for witch-hunting a successful entrepreneur and resource mobiliser extraordinaire who is creating jobs and building assets. Unfortunately, in this detailed story of Sahara and its flashy and gauche promoter, the author has missed this wood for the trees.
Dilip Thakore
Riveting history
The Emperor of All Maladies; Siddhartha Mukherjee; Scribner; Rs.599; Pages 608
Curiously under-publicised in this country, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies has won a string of awards including a Pulitzer Prize and Padma Shri for the author — assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, New York this year.
Mukherjee describes the book as a biography of cancer with his experiences of patients afflicted by the disease interwoven into the tale, rendering it autobiographical as well. Published in 2010, this tome continues to enthrall readers, and recently Time magazine included it in its list of the 100 best non-fiction books of all time.
Cancer is not a disease, but many diseases lumped together. Beyond a common fundamental feature — the abnormal growth and proliferation of malignant cells — cancers impact human beings in different ways and therefore don’t respond to uniform or predictable lines of treatment. The complex malady has intrigued physicians for millennia.
In this insightful book, Mukherjee traces the history of cancer to a first description in a 15 ft long papyrus manuscript of 17th century BCE Egypt written by Imhotep, the court physician, who concluded that cancer (lymphoma) of the breast was beyond cure. Three thousand years on, several cancers such as leukemia and Hodgkin’s lymphoma are now curable and several others go into remission with modern therapies. But along the way, there were many twists and turns, and just when a particular treatment offered promise of a cure, unforeseen complications would snatch patients away.
Among the many scientists who fitted pieces of the cancer jigsaw together, looms the towering figure of Sidney Farber (1903-73), whose specialty as a paediatric pathologist — ‘a doctor of the dead’ — relegated him to the nether echelons of the medical hierarchy during his career. Limited to conducting postmortems in the basement of Children’s Hospital, Boston, his assiduous study of the organs of patients who had died of cancer yielded valuable clues. His well-charted documentation of childhood leukemia, a cancer of the blood and most common in children, provided evidence that this malignancy would respond to drugs. He led the first drug trials on leukemia and obtained temporary improvements. He later pioneered the treatment of Wilm’s tumour, a childhood cancer of the kidney.
There’s an Indian sidelight to the story of The Emperor of All Maladies. Farber obtained a regular supply of the first anti-cancer drugs, aminopterin and methotrexate from Yellapragada Subbarow (1895-1948) who developed them for the well-known pharma company, Lederle, New York (since acquired by Pfizer). Subbarow was a graduate of Madras Medical College. But unqualified to work as a medical practitioner in the US, he started work as a night porter in a Boston hospital. He managed to land a job in the hospital’s biochemistry lab and began a remarkable career as a drugs researcher, developing several miracle drugs, and his partnership with Farber is one of the classic stories of modern medicine.
Farber’s work also lighted the imagination of Mary Lasker, a Manhattan socialite, who brought indefatigable energy and social networking skills to find cures for cancer. Their evangelistic fervour captured the attention of the media and government, resulting in the passage of the National Cancer Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1971. A year later, Sidney Farber, now regarded as the father of chemotherapy, passed away.
The saga of Farber and evolution of chemotherapy is only one of the many absorbing stories in this book. The development of radiotherapy is just as fascinating, as are stories of maverick surgeons who pioneered operating techniques for excision of various cancers.
I wish I had read this book when I was a medical student. It would have given me early insights and preparation for the complex world of medical sciences. Studying medicine is not just an academic discipline, it’s exciting science, full of promise of new discoveries and diagnostic tests and treatments.
But a doctor’s life also has moments of deep despair, when therapy fails and a patient succumbs. For me the book captures this interplay of deeply satisfying triumphs and unforeseen tragedies, with every chapter like a whodunit novel. In all people, the word cancer instills fear, portends death. So whoever you are, you will find this chronicle a real page turner.
The Emperor of All Maladies is not mere popular science, it’s a literary classic in the bookshelf of medicine. In 2011, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the citation aptly described it as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science”.
Dr. Glenn Kharkongor