A leading Indian industrialist today claimed it was possible to be competitive in a global market ‘and still follow the path of social consciousness and maintain values’. Sarosh Ghandy, Managing Director of Telcon, a Tata Industries company which manufactures construction equipment, was speaking at the conference ‘Globalization : from conflict to opportunity’ being held, 20-24 July, at the Initiatives of Change centre in Caux, Switzerland.

A leading Indian industrialist today claimed it was possible to be competitive in a global market ‘and still follow the path of social consciousness and maintain values’. Sarosh Ghandy, Managing Director of Telcon, a Tata Industries company which manufactures construction equipment, was speaking at the conference ‘Globalization : from conflict to opportunity’ being held, 20-24 July, at the Initiatives of Change centre in Caux, Switzerland.

Ghandy had been director of Tata’s Telco (Tata Engineer) plant in Jamshedpur, Bihar, before taking up his current post at Telcon in Bangalore. The two major Tata companies in Jamshedpur, Tata Steel (Tisco) and Tata Engineering (Telco), which are amongst India’s largest private sector firms, ‘spend around $20 million a year on providing facilities to their employees’, he estimated. These ranged from housing, education, health care including private hospitals and subsidized power supply, to rural village development projects, family planning and welfare and community forestry. Despite these costs, ‘Tata Steel produces the cheapest steel in the world, and exports its products all over Asia, Europe and America,’ he said. Tata Engineering maintains 68 per cent of India’s market share in commercial vehicles, including trucks and buses, and exports them to 45 countries.

‘My experience,’ he continued, ‘indicates that competitiveness is not merely a function of how closely one watches the bottom line or cuts costs. Unimaginative cost cutting can result in a decline in efficiency and effectiveness and thus add to unseen costs.’ It was necessary to ‘cut on wastage, maximize on the benefits of new technology and work towards the whole company working to a set of values. In industry many of us tend to underestimate the power and value of the human element.’

This had been emphasized for him when, 30 years ago, he began sending groups of Telco management and union committee members to industrial training programmes run by Initiatives of Change at its conference centre in Panchgani, Maharashtra. These ‘resulted in a better understanding of each others’ problems and pressures at the organizational level’, Ghandy said. The resultant effect on the shop floor was ‘a marked change in the levels of alienation and tension and an increased desire on the part of workers and management to understand each other and work together’. Then, in the early 1990s, ‘we started introducing self-managed teams at the worker level. The effects were dramatic. Tensions on the shop floor disappeared ; the maintenance of equipment improved markedly ; quality levels improved ; customer complaints reduced markedly ; and even the appearance of the shop floor improved.’

Globalization, however, had ‘thrown up severe challenges’, he continued. Both Tisco and Telco had had to downsize drastically. ‘But realizing the miseries that would be created among thousands of people, each company devised liberal severance schemes to protect the salaries of displaced employees up to his or her retirement.’ ‘Technology alone cannot make an organization competitive,’ Ghandy concluded. ‘It is leadership and management that makes an organization competitive. The human asset is the greatest asset and should be treated as such. It is actions that count, not just words.’

Mike Smith

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