BOON OR A BOONDOGGLE ? (Dr. Y. V. Rao)

                                                                  BOON OR  A BOONDOGGLE ?

                                                 Dr. Yerneni Venkateswara Rao

M.Sc., Ph. D

Retired Principal

Akkineni Nageswara Rao College

GUDIVADA- A.P

yernenivrao@gmail.com

BI-83
Time was when every Indian was proud of the Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) the “ Temples of Modern Indian” as Jawaharlal Nehru termed them for they had been established supposedly to be the standard-bearers of socialism by capturing the “commanding heights” of the country’s economy and pave the way for a “socialist pattern of society” aimed at providing equal opportunities for all and containing disparities in incomes and wealth.

Now, however, most have degenerated into large inefficient dens of laziness and lethargy fit for work- shirkers and self-seekers, who hold the nation hostage to their ever escalating greed avarice and rapaciousness in spite of their being “islands of high wages” with blessings and connivance of the ubiquitous / ravenous politicians and their co-hearts and lumpen cronies always with an eye to the main chance. They have long ceased to be symbols of socialism and today they represent nothing more than state capitalism, which is monopolistic and therefore non-accountable  and has nothing but content for the consumer. They are in a state of atrophy, decay and disarray and have become objects of derision and denigration thanks mainly to the bureaucratic over-lording and politically inspired labour militancy and ubiquitous interference from political bosses. In short, public sector as an essential and vibrant element in the building-up of the country’s economy and society – as a locomotive of growth – ceased to be long ago.

Whatever has brought about this precipitous fall from the zenith of initial expectations to the nadir of present hopelessness is nothing if not a scenario highlighting how not to run an enterprise.

The successive unthinking governments – whether congress or non-congress, the later being conglomerates of small parties coming together for the purpose – expectedly of course, have persisted in the dogmatic policy of treating the PSUs as employment providers rather than as engines of the country’s industrial growth and development and, instead of running them as model enterprises for emulation by the private sector industry, have remained mute spectators to the inexorable degeneracy that has overtaken them. Consequently they are the most scandalously over-staffed and abysmally underperforming enterprises in the country today.

Any elementary analysis of the circumstances that led to this unedifying situation would at once reveal two fatal flaws in running the PSUs. One was entrusting their management to bureaucrats, who were prisoners of procedure rather than guardians of performance, instead of to boards manned by competent professionals authorised to manage and be responsible for results. A far more pernicious consequence of the bureaucrats induction into these is the introduction of the hierarchical organisation where position carries weightage, responsibility boils down to no more than supervisory control, where vision and leadership are conspicuous by their absence. This was done in preference to a clear and what is a vastly superior alternative viz. that of entrusting them to organisational agencies animated by a conscientious intent and plan to accentuate response- ability, goal-oriented functioning and channelized effort. The other was government’s over-indulgent attitude towards labour as reflected in its eagerness to pander to them by catering not only to their every need but all their greed too. The first has remained uncorrected because the bureaucrats like anyone else in their position were loathe to part with their unearned rewards and perquisites and privileges and without their consent nothing ever moves in the government. As per the second there is hardly any need to say anything for,  things are clear as day. So nothing has been attempted nor anything done to check the root and, worse, the spree of freebies has gone on unabated. What is more, they have even continued to stray into ever newer areas of operation, each one more unwarranted than the last opening more and more public enterprises including even tourist hotels, food and footwear industries – Modern Foods India Ltd and Tannery and Footwear Corporation – for making modern bread and national shoes and cheppals respectively.

Even when the adverse consequences of the labour laws enacted during the early euphoric phase of the socialistic fervours – understandingly of course, heavily loaded in favour of the labour class – have become so glaring and the message has been so loud and clear no government to date has dared to touch let alone review and recast these laws with a view to restoring balance and injecting dynamism into the country’s industrial policy with the result the country has been reduced a vast museum of sick, dying and dead industries thanks largely to the perennial problem of labour unrest in the form of strikes – hunger, relay hunger, indefinite, token, pen-down, tool-down and a hundred other varieties of them – dharnas, bandhs, gheraos, morchas, demonstrations, hartals, fasts unto death, protests, ralies and what not on the flimsiest grounds aided and abetted by the political parties, on the one hand, and encouraged by the generally lackadaisical and even compliant attitude of the government, on the other. The unarticulated assumption seems to be that ends justify the means, however, unreasonable, unjustified and even reprehensible they may be. Consequently, our country has been bogged down in the quagmire backwardness while our neighbours like the Asian Tigers and especially China, bidding adieu to the failed God of Marxist Communism, albeit unofficially,  and shedding all the dogmas associated with it, have been making phenomenal progress registering spectacular growth rates year after year and, not surprisingly, are today in a position to join the ranks of the industrially advanced / developed nations of the world.

All this unmistakably points to the fact that the need of the hour a bold, dynamic and forward looking industrial policy of which a humane labour policy will be an integral part to ensure labour welfare consistent with overall industrial development, instead of labour welfare at any cost, even at the cost of wellbeing and survival of the industry, as at present.

  So much for the omissions and the commissions of the government in the industrial front. Now, coming to the other players in the game, the picture is not less dismal/depressing. Bureaucrats  having neither entrepreneurial zeal , commitment, integrity, perseverance and loyalty of family managers nor ability, drive, innovativeness and expertise of professional managers—which together constitute the basic ingredients of successful management strategy—appointed on adhoc basis and for uncertain terms as chief executives with immunity from accountability on the one hand and trade union activists adhering to the self-destructive philosophy of benefits here and now with no thought for the health and long term survival of the undertakings ever bent on taking undue advantage of the out dated and obsolete labour laws , on the other , have been the bane of the PSUs. The former, mostly through sheer incomprehension of the intricacies of running industrial enterprises on sound business lines and partly constrained by the rigours of the multi-layered decision-making process inherent to bureaucracy have tended to treat them, at best, as extensions of government departments with all the attendant evils of indecision , procrastination and red-tapism and, at worst, as sinecures of affording ample privileges and few obligations , and the latter through blind adherence to the ideology of class struggle have tended to view them not as assets meant to create national wealth while providing gainful employment to people but as milch-cows to be sucked dry and the two of them through mutual antagonism and mistrust have eliminated any scope for understanding and cooperation between themselves in running these undertakings. What is even more appalling is that when on the few occasions on which the bureaucrat-managers acted, it was only to buy peace from the union-activists by acceding to some or all of their demands however unreasonable and injurious to the health of the enterprise they might be. Day to day management was, for all practical purposes, replaced by management/managing to stumble from crisis to crisis leading to sickness, decay and death of the PSUs. Thus, in the absence of strong binding will, sinew and muscle instead of acting in step with brain began to dictate to the latter and the results could hardly be other than what they actually were. Obviously , the career-graph-minding bureaucrats and the trade union leaders with their mean and lean work culture have with them a potent prescription for running any project and ruined they most certainly have several of these enterprises to such an extent that they have turned into millstones around the country’s neck instead of glittering jewels in its crown as originally envisaged/visualized.

  The political parties out of the compulsions of competitive populism, on the one hand, and driven by the constant need for one-upmanship, on the other, have vied with one another in pampering the organized labour sector , which constitutes a miniscule 3%of the country’s total work force beyond bounds , instead of promoting discipline and work ethic among them for the greater good of all concerned so much so that labour militancy has assumed menacing proportions dealing a death blow to production and profitability of the PSUs by making both up gradation of technology for improving quality and productivity—India ranks 40^th in terms of productivity –and attainment of maximum output per unit of labour cost by linking productivity with wages virtually impossible. This is quite in tune with the politicians’ penchant for treating the PSUs as their happy hunting grounds for short term gains, and to expect the political class to change its character is like anticipating the wild beasts to shed their savagery.

  Now a few words about the work force, the last but the most important of the players in the game will be in order. While it was nobody’s case that the workers should not get their due , everyone at the same time expected that the labour force in the PSUs would honestly discharge their duties by working hard and sincerely and try to translate into reality the hopes and aspirations of the nation in creating these oases in what was virtually an arid desert of rampant unemployment and grinding poverty. And many wished that these enterprises would turn out to be veritable springs of the country’s industrial progress and economic advancement. Notwithstanding the high hopes and expectations things began to drift and it was not long before the workers started viewing the PSUs as instruments to further their class interests in isolation rather than in the overall context of those of the undertakings. They began taking recourse to all sorts of coercive , subversive and at times, downright reprehensible tactics rooted in insincerity and ignorance, indiscipline and irresponsibility , intolerance and inflexibility , laziness and greed , callousness and violence and of course, Marxist mythology of class war every now and then to achieve their narrow  selfish ends , totally forgetting the qualitative difference between the public enterprises and those in the private sector established purely for the benefit of particular individuals or interest groups thereby reducing many of them to bottomless holes gobbling up with insatiable hunger the scarce public resources which should have rightly been used for social development through reduction of poverty and unemployment, spread of literacy and provision of health care and other basic services. About 240 PSUs in the central sector with a capital outlay/investment of 2,02,000 crores earn a dismal 5% as overall return on investments. The unions particularly those of the leftist persuasions aggressively promoted sloth and incompetence among the overpaid and underworked ‘workers’ of the PSUs in course of their ‘revolutionary struggles’ unmindful of the larger interests of the country. They have indulged in excesses on such a massive scale that they have become thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the people with their credibility touching new lows and their disrepute new highs, and today few , if any pay heed to what they think or say , and even those who appear to pay heed to them do so not because of the reasonableness of the arguments they advance in favour of their grievances and causes or the veracity of the ‘facts’ they proffer in their support but purely because of the fear of the destructive potential they still have. The extent of indiscipline and lack of motivation among workers today is so great that the rate of growth in value addition in industries is a dismal 7% per annum when compared to that in China which recorded an impressive 50%, they thus generated a general feeling of being let down in the minds of the people at large. As Rajiv Gandhi once remarked, “We cannot run an inefficient system, call it socialism , and bill it to the poor.” This way of paying for the wilful negligence and downright sloth of the public sector workers only institutionalises the practise of robbing an honest pal to pay a thieving peter.

  This turn of events, though shocking, is perhaps not unexpected nor are its causes ununderstandable. Coming as they were from the backward and underprivileged sections of the society, most of the workers lacked cultural sophistication, familiarity with normal democratic values and a spirit of accommodation. With their immature thinking, they fell easy prey to the machinations of the ruthlessly ambitious and recklessly self seeking adventurers and hotheads among the trade union leaders with a single track pursuit of short term benefits and privileges, irrespective of the adverse repercussions to the undertaking in particular and the country in general. Fortified, on the one hand, by the right to strike as in the free world countries and on the other by job security as in the erstwhile Socialist Bloc countries, they found it easy to confront the managements armed with relatively weak weapons like ‘no work no pay’, layoff and lockout, which could hardly be used /invoked in the prevailing atmosphere of pervasive populism, permissiveness and all round indiscipline. Excited and exhilarated by the obvious outcome of each such unequal encounter , they craved for more of them and indulged in excesses to such an unacceptable degree as to make even the fellow-travellers blush with embarrassment and shame and the people at large wince with revulsion. In short, they have ended up proving Spengler right, in saying “Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes”—exploitation of the many by the rapacious few. Having thus forfeited peoples’ sympathy , trust and goodwill , they now face no less a bleak future than the one they have forced on the country as a whole consequent upon the government’s policy of disinvestment and restructuring of PSUs with a view to revamping their managements as well as restricting its own role as an economic player to that of a regulator and facilitator of rather than a participator in fresh investments for the country’s industrial development. This shift in government’s focus from participation and management  to facilitation and regulation, though long overdue is a welcome step , which marks the beginning of the end of what has turned out to be an insurmountable problem of massive proportions , that has been bedevilling our economic advancement all these years and which heralds a new spring in this vital sector.

  Did not Bapu, the Father of the Nation, exhort the workers everywhere and particularly those employed in government undertakings to eschew strikes on the eve of the country’s independence , July 26, 1947, to be exact? He noted that “strikes were motivated mostly by individual selfishness or by party leaders pursuing their own narrow interests, and in either case strikers become their own victims and they also hurt the welfare of the people.” (Mahatma Gandhi: The Last 200 Days)

  Finally, the only thing that could be emulated/copied from the functioning of these behemoths and which, unfortunately, has been copied rather effectively by the labour force in the private as well as the vast unorganized sector is the mindless militancy entailing sky-rocketing labour costs and abysmal productivity levels in every sector of the economy. The two together bringing the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

  Thus , like the causes for the defeat and death of the ill-starred Karna in the epic Mahabharata, the reasons for the sickness and demise of most of the PSUs are many and all, starting from the government , going through the bureaucrat managers and the trade union leaders and ending up with the labour force should be ashamed of themselves for their respective roles in killing the geese that would have laid golden eggs, had they paid any attention to their well-being at the right time. One is simply dismayed and appalled at their brazen abdication of responsibility. And if only they had spared a little thought to the future of these enterprises, as enlightened self interest certainly demands , they would have lived up to our initial expectations.

  Blind with greed and selfishness, they all have severally and together converted the public sector as a whole into a gigantic dole-extracting and favour-distributing agency, and today, it is no exaggeration to say that it is no more than a wasteland dotted by ash hills of dead and dying PSUs. But the tragedy is that practically everyone concerned with these has every reason to want things to remain more or less the way they are.

  After having analysed the economic crisis the country was facing in 1945, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India and the originator of these PSUs sought to overcome it by “ a planned approach to social structure involving progressive socialization of the means of production which increases production and ensures a fair and equitable distribution so as to raise the standards of the people as a whole.” That his fond hopes have turned into dupes, his high expectations stood rubbished and his pious dreams lay shattered is but an unedifying chapter in the recent history of our country.

  In presenting this overview, the intention certainly is not to deride or to rundown the PSUs but to explore the pitfalls into which we have slipped, the soured dreams we have had to encounter/experience on the way, the hurdles against which we have stumbled and the dead ends we have reached in running them so as to be able to steer clear of them in future.

  Now the question of questions is , will we ever have enough courage to face reality , wisdom to learn lessons from experience , strength to act on them, pragmatism to profit from them, discipline to pull this great country of ours  from the quick sands of backwardness and finally, will we ever have concern for, and commitment to the interests of the coming generations to pass it on to them as one of the industrial and economic giants playing its due role in world politics with its head held high in the comity of nations ???

  Mercifully, of late, certain positive signals and symptoms of sanity have started trickling in and this dismal picture is showing signs of abating. The idea that “it is not the business of the government to be in business” seems to have at last sunk in deep in keeping with the current international thinking and with past bitter experience. The government’s decision to sell off 11 PSUs and the road map for disinvestment of its equity in 33 PSUs including privatization or outright sale of 26 of them during the fiscal 2000-2001 was announced on June 24, 2000. This initiative of the government to disinvest and restructure the PSUs has been given a fillip by its latest decision to grant financial and operational autonomy to the profit making PSUs after broad basing their boards of management through induction of non-official and part-time directors as part of a policy to depoliticize, deregulate and debureaucratize  the public sector which, if implemented sincerely , will indeed be a great step in the direction of the government addressing itself to the many melodies and malignancies afflicting this vital sector evidently the realization has at last dawned on the policy makers and the government that there is an imperative necessity to get rid of the dead weight of the past—the worst days of the command economy—despite the prevailing contrary view held by some sections in the country still carrying the ideological baggage of old style Leftism.

  Another parallel development of equal significance is the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment upholding the Kerala high court’s ruling declaring calling and enforcing bandhs as unconstitutional and illegal which, if taken note of by other state governments and acted upon by them in true letter and spirit, will have a major impact not only on the industrial relations but also on the economy as a whole by minimizing lost man-days as well as eliminating needless impediments to the smooth flow of day to day life of the people. The immense relief felt by the people as evidenced by the near universal approbation the judgment has evoked/ elicited speaks volumes about the pent up frustration and anger against such uncivilized and short-sighted practices. Indeed, some of these measures and the favourable public reaction to them seemed to have produced a somewhat sobering effect on the unions and labour as reflected in their wariness, of late, in resorting to the confrontational approach as a matter of course as has been their wont for so long. After all, the zero-sum-game played out endlessly all these years has resulted in temporary gains to one side at the cost of the other and was hardly conducive for the emergence of a win-win situation through the vastly superior participative instead of the conflictual approach to the labour management relations where all not only benefit in the short term but also will be assured of long term gains by way of (1) security of continued employment to the existing workers on better terms, (2)adequate resources and increased elbow room for the management to expand and modernize the undertakings to make them not only vibrant but also thriving enterprises/ concerns capable of coping with the rigours of the emerging highly competitive industrial environment at home and abroad—the Global Competiveness Report for 1999 placed India at the 53^rd position in a list of 59 countries—and lastly, (3) new openings to the ever growing multitude of jobseekers. All this points to the urgent need to develop the ethos and culture of participative management and functioning at all levels right down to the lowest level in these undertakings. Minus this prospect, the industry in general and the PSUs in particular will remain as effete and unsustainable as they have been all these years.

  What has been happening in the recent past on these different fronts certainly augurs well for the future of the industrial development , a vital ingredient in the overall growth of the economy of the country.

  Additionally, if government follows up its welcome even if belated move with legislative measures to recast the country’s outdated labour laws to be in tune with the present imperatives, if the unions shedding their traditional mindset that there is a historic cleavage between the unions and the employer promote a wholesome change of attitude among the workers conducive to the maintenance  of a climate of industrial peace and increased productivity in deference to Gandhiji’s exhortation of 1947 and finally, if all this results in effectively putting an end to the depredatory forays of politicians into the functioning of these undertakings , we might still be able to pull the country out of the morass of stagnation and backwardness and march forward along the high road to industrial and economic progress and prosperity and make our country a key player on the world stage. Happily, none of these ifs is impossible of attainment/ fulfilment /being fulfilled.

B1-84

Discerning parents know how to wait until their children become parents in their turn before expecting any credit for bringing them up in the first place , for only then can the latter appreciate what an onerous responsibility it is to rear children. Even in the worst case scenario—a very likely scenario in today’s pervasive culture of consumerism—they are wise enough not to fall prey to disappointment, despair and despondency, nor to withhold their love and affection from their progeny for, they are parents, pure and simple; additionally , they know only too well that love is giving , giving freely and unreservedly , not in return for something but for its own sake. After all, our willingness to eclipse ourselves in the process of bringing up our children, and to dissolve and disappear in the love and strength we give them is the ultimate badge of glory we should treasure in our heart of hearts as parents.

  How I wish I can count myself one among such a lucky lot!

Looked at another way, our being grateful to our parents doesn’t automatically confer a right on us to expect that so should our children be to us. Genuine gratitude stems from a sense of duty without any linkage with rights. Among the many reasons for our failure to evoke gratitude in our children, a possible one could be our inadequacies and imperfections in bringing them up. It is our bounden duty to accept their verdict on how well or ill we have discharged our parental obligations instead of pleading not guilty or worse, justifying our conduct, for that only ends up/results in our being hated by them. Every right flows from a duty performed well but not every duty entails a right. If that were to be otherwise, life would be reduced to nothing more than crass commerce( See B4-6)

B1-85

A sincere leader, a courageous leader never hesitates to commend what is not palatable to the people at the moment if he believes it is in their best interests, and what is more, works for its acceptance by the people at large even at great personal risk (even in the teeth of vehement opposition) instead of trying to ride the crest of popular fancy by making the right populist noises as is being done by the current crop of the so called champions of commonweal. A statesman, however, is one who can grasp the essence of the receding past , interpret the racing present and come up with an inspiring vision of the beckoning future, and who , by his ability to both reconcile and discipline , and his powerful personality and persuasive eloquence and, above all, his confidence in himself and his unshakeable belief in the people can sway them so profoundly as to make them own his interpretation of the present as their own and his vision of the future as theirs, and lead them as one man to work resolutely for its translation into concrete reality through a credible strategy to cope with the present problems—an object of admiration and adoration to his countrymen and that of great respect and high regard to the world , in a word, a legend in his lifetime.

  History , after all , judges political leaders by their ability to think big , their readiness to walk down the road that is not often taken and their courage to face up to the consequences.

B1-86 (B5-3)

The monster of corruption takes its birth in an environment of regulatory repression, inept governance and malfeasant administration, and fattens by the hour feeding on public apathy. With apathy abounding in such great measure, it is no wonder corruption, not only in its restricted sense but in all its varied connotations and ramifications is the most devastating epidemic sweeping the country today. Strangely , when the nation should be battling fiercely against corruption , it seems to be becoming less and less dominant as an issue of even public debate or electoral politics showing the level to which public apathy or tolerance has descended despite vigorous efforts to sensitize the nation on the issue to the chagrin of old timers.