Around early December, I picked up a casual conversation with a junior colleague from the Management Development Department and mentioned to him that I would be soon leaving the services of the United Bank as I might get some offers from the private sector. This was deliberate planting of information: I knew that he would soon carry this information to his boss Captain Ghosh, a retired army officer, who has been looking after development of managerial personnel but not a part of the usual personnel administration department. I loved United Bank as my first employer and did not really leave but was seriously afflicted by a perception in my mind that the Bank was not taking care to reward me in tune with my capabilities and aspirations. Sometime back, my boss' boss had remarked in a closed group dinner party in response to a suggestion by one of his close friends that it was high time that I had been given the second promotion: 'Sen is getting his PhD soon and then we will kick him up'. It was good English from a B.Sc in economics from London but I was rather annoyed by his rather middle class sentiment and reluctance to think what I could have been thinking about myself and the Bank. So, I did not want my boss and boss' boss to know that I was seriously consider leaving. But I wanted that this information travels up to the top management through a different route. And, it did as I would find out later.
I did not have any job offer yet. Earlier in August, a public sector firm had advertised for the post of Econometrics. I knew I could not apply except through proper channel: public sector employees were obligated to route their applications for jobs in other public sector companies only through their existing public sector employers (a kind of Communist-Socialist State oppression on employees to distort the market for human resources : something I strongly deplored as State mafia-ism). I did not want to use this route because the the personnel department would take a long time and the Bank may use its influence to ensure that I was not recruited by the other public sector company. So, what could I have done. Try my luck: my wife forwarded my resume to the company Something else would happen. I would receive a telephone call from my professor, head of economic research unit at the Indian Statistical Institute: he said that the Institute had received a request from the very same public sector company to recommend candidates from its past and current students and that he considered me as the most appropriate candidate to be recommended if I were interested. I immediately agreed with him that the Institute could recommend my name. In early November the company called me for interview. Before I could meet the interview board, the usual public sector company personnel department staff there would ask me for a no objection certificate from my current employer United Bank of India. I told them that they had not mentioned this in their letter advising me to to turn up for interview and I could get such No objection certificate in the event of my selection after the interview. They let me go in to meet the Selection Board. There were three persons on the Board: the Director Finance of the company. He asked me all the questions and I found him taking lot of interest. The second person on the Board was my teacher of econometrics at the University. When he was requested to ask me questions, he observed that he knew me well as his students and that I had got the highest marks in Econometrics at the University. So, he would not ask me any further questions. Then, there was the Director Personnel: he inquired why I had not routed my application through my current employer. I would reply to him with a question:"Did I apply?" The smart Finance Director immediately quipped: " Sean's name and resume was received in response to our request to the Indian Statistical Institute". Finally, I was asked when could I join if I were selected. I told them my current employer would require me to give three months' notice.
In the middle of December, Captain Ghosh telephoned and asked me to meet him as soon as possible. I knew that my colleague in his Department would have informed him about the conversation we had about 19 days back. I met him in his office room. He said that he had learnt that I was thinking of leaving United Bank of India but wondered why. I replied that I was happy with my job but felt that I was constrained by opportunity to shoulder higher responsibilty challange as a reward my performance. He told me that I should not worry because I was one among the blue-eyed officers of the Bank whose career in the Bank would be bright. Some thing would be done for me soon. And finally he said, "Don't jump on the next bus." I thanked him and came back to my desk and did not share this interaction with Capt Ghosh with anyone else.
I got the job offer from the company that interviwed in early January and I replied them I would join by early April. But I did not immediately resign because I would really require to give one month's notice to United Bank of India to leave them. By mid- January 1977 I received the letter of promotion to Staff Officer Grade II with immediate effect and they designated me as Assistant Economist, the position held by my boss who had been recently promoted to the position of the Economist in Staff Officer Grade I. I happily accepted the promotion. Everyone would congratulate me, especially as the promtion came suddenly. I worked in my new position for 10 days and went on leave for a month with cash back for another one month's leave. Colleagues thought that I went on leave to celebrate my promotion. I had then two little son's to play with.
I resumed office towards the end of February and soon thereafter submitted my resignation. Colleagues were surprised and wanted to know where I would be joining next. I told them that's a secret. Bosses were unhappy especially because the resignation soon after a promotion was viewed as insulting. My boss's boss was so angry that when I visted the Bank after a month of my quitting the Bank, he virtually asked me leave the Bank's premises immediately. I knew that his reluctance to promote me earlier must have earned him some comments from his bosses when I had quit immediately after a promotion. I learned that a manager must know how not to lose a useful resource on which investment had been made. I bade good-bye to United Bank of India as my employer in March 1977 after serving them for 75 months.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Jubilee Pains & Resolve: My unfolding Voyage 069
My employer United Bank of India celebrated its Silver Jubilee in 1975. In the same year, I had both Golden (50) and Diamond (60) Jubilee of my employment with the Bank in terms of months of pay-checks received. I had not been with any school or college or university for so many months. I had developed some degree of endurance with the increasingly old environment at the Bank. But Jubilees led me to review my achievements: I had a decent job with reasonably comfortable earnings, I had good romance and got married to the girl I chose, I had a little son to play with. I had already submitted my PhD dissertation submitted and two technical articles published in the National Institute of Bank Management's journal. By bosses were pleased with me and I had got a promotion. I received admiration from colleagues and come to gather a fairly good overview of banking and bank management in India as also an insight into various aspects of my employers strengths and weaknesses.
Yet, something would bug me. I had lot of time to take up new projects both at office and outside. The Bank was not prepared to let young officers to get into diversified areas of management responsibility with any fast track movement upward in hierarchy: rather would require me to continue doing whatever I had so far demonstrated that I was capable of doing efficiently and effectively.
All this was generating a sense of urge for getting over the constraints to a movement towards a more varied and higher level exposure. By this time, I had picked up, from an article in Harvard Business Review, a hypothesis that power does not lie in the position you enjoy but in the ability to influence colleagues, peers, bosses and other minds through your depth of knowledge,innovative ideas and communication. I needed to enhance that power for in India in the foreseeable future public sector would only generate opportunities for growth and that would accrue to anyone with seniority irrespective of your capability, potential or performance.
So, I was in search of new challenges in 1976. How do I make my old parents happier? How do my wife get more happiness? How do I get into an office environment that would make me learn more things at a fast pace as had happened in the first 36 months of my service in the United Bank? And, of course, what else could I do?
I tried behavioral management tools to develop transparent, "u r OK, i am OK" sessions with my wife for better mutual understanding and failed: she would suspect that I was trying to brain-wash her further. My parents were happy that we were staying again with them with our baby son. My wife had been on long leave, beyond the three months' maternity leave she was entitled to. Now she would need to resume office and my son would be taken adequate care at home by my mother and sister-in law during her absence of eight/ nine hours a day. So, one fine morning, she reported back to office. In the evening she announced to me that she would never go back to office as she was unable to bear the few hours of separation with the five-month old child. So, she would immediately resign. And, we got a new challenge cropping up: she desired another kid.
Since my wife wanted to resign from office, we went back to our rented apartment. Jhupa was growing up fast. The landlady who lived on the second-story of the same building, Maya-di and her daughter were very affectionate to all of us. So, was Jyotirmoyee-di, who lived in the adjacent apartment ed. This short, beautiful lady had moved in to this flat recently after she had retired as a Professor of History in a college in Patna in Bihar. She had lost her husband when she was just 13 and then went on to study in school, college, university and had gone to London for higher studies. She was also a guest teacher in the Sarada Mission Women's College nearby. Through her we cam in touch with the College's Principal, Saradaji (Prabrajika ...Prana), a very affectionate Sanyasin of the mission. Jyotirmoyee-di was very fond of Jhupa and she enjoyed see him crawling and then learning to walk, dance and speak. The next door neighbor were also very affectionate to us. One of their relatives, a professor in the university at Gauhati, had come on a visit. Jhupa would try to talk to him from the small balcony that we had opposite the neighbors backyard. One day this professor told my wife that when Jhupa would grow up he would be a mathematician. My wife was very happy.
We would be visiting our parent's residence, 20 minutes away from our apartment, every week. That would make them happy. But I thought I could make my parents happier if we could go for a trip[ together. I was by now entitled to get reimbursement of another family trip to anywhere in India by train. This time I chose Guwahati (formerly Gauhati) in Assam because the 50 minutes air trip from Kolkata to Guwahati was admissible for reimbursement because the train journey involved two nights over an unusually log stretch. So, in August-September 1976, five of us (my wife, mother, father, one-year old son Jhupa and I)flew off to Guwahati, and then straight from the Airport went in taxi to Kamakshya Temple on the top of a hill about 45 minutes away from the airport. At the temple, my parents would offer a special puja worship ceremony that would take about two hours. Then we went in a taxi to the city center and took a bus that would carry us along the sloping and winding roads up the hills to Shillong, the beautiful capital of the State of Meghalaya (Residence in the Clouds). We stayed in a hotel at Shillong for three nights. It was so exhilarating and romantic roaming around the hilly terrain with clouds touching you. It was a romantic environment as well. My father told me the name of a relative whom he knew lived in Shillong. I searched out from the telephone directory (there were not many people who had a telephone in the sparsely populated town those days and the Bengali's among them would have very few) probable Bengali candidates with the surname my father had said and ultimately got in touch with the person's daughter in law and wife: the person concerned was no more but his son and the family were still in Shillong. We visited them one afternoon. Shillong was cold and we had to use blankets at night. One evening when Jhupa was with my mother and she was taking her dinner of mutton-rice, my wife inquired about what Jhupa was doing? My mother replied that he was sleeping under the blanket beside her. Soon, my wife would ask about from where some peculiar sound was coming from and then find Jhupa was enjoying mutton juice from my mothers fingers while enjoying the warmth under the blanket. We would down from Shillong on the fourth day to stay at a hotel in Guwahati for three days. Here Topu had a relative. Again, I tried with the Telephone Directory to find out her cousin's husbands telephone number, contacted them and visited them one evening for an hour or two.
Back to work after 10 days vacation and I started exploring for an opportunity somewhere. I have to get out of United Bank. But before I could do that in November, Chupa, our second child arrived 15 months after
Jhupa, his elder brother. In the case of Jhupa, when the gynecologist had confirmed and I shared the information with my mother, she was so happy. Then, on a Monday morning, as I was getting ready to go to office, Topu said that the arrival date seems to have arrive. I took her to my parents' place and deposited her there. By the time I had come back from office in the evening, mother had already got her admitted to the hospital five minutes walk from the residence and late at night the nurses rang up so that we can walk to the hospital to welcome Jhupa. In the case of Chupa, Topu felt uncomfortable at around 10 PM on a Saturday night as we were just about retiring to bed. We left Jhupa under the care of the neighbor, rushed Topu to another hospital near Shyambazar Five Point Crossing, half an hour away by taxi from my rented apartment, admitted her to the hospital, returned home by mid-night, took back Jhupa from the neighbors and passed the night with Jhupa sleeping for the first time without his mother beside him. In the early morning got up to feed Jhupa, gave him a bath, dressed him up first. Then I also had a bath, took some breakfast and both of us went to my parents' residence. They had already received the telephone call from the hospital about Chupa's arrival in the early hours of Sunday. I left Jhupa with my sister in law, informed my in laws walking down to their residence three minutes away and then proceeded to see Chupa and Topu at the hospital. On Tuesday, I would bring them straight to my parents' residence where we would be staying for the next seek weeks. When Topu arrived home with Chupa, Jhupa received some kind of a shock: as she approached Jhupa to take him in her lap after a hug and kisses, Jhupa suddenly felt shy and jumped on my lap loo kin asking at the infant baby in the cot! That is the beginning of a new journey for the two brother growing up together.
I resumed office on Wednesday and explained my absence for the previous two days sharing the good news with the colleagues. Malay Babu quipped. " Basudeb, you had just been back from the hills a few weeks back and we never imagined that your wife could have been already pregnant! How do you keep secrets?". It was really amazing that my wife's movements and appearance would not give any perceptible signals of pregnancy to visitors or passers-by during the relevant two periods.
But now an opportunity would come for a new work experience, besides a new family experience.
Yet, something would bug me. I had lot of time to take up new projects both at office and outside. The Bank was not prepared to let young officers to get into diversified areas of management responsibility with any fast track movement upward in hierarchy: rather would require me to continue doing whatever I had so far demonstrated that I was capable of doing efficiently and effectively.
All this was generating a sense of urge for getting over the constraints to a movement towards a more varied and higher level exposure. By this time, I had picked up, from an article in Harvard Business Review, a hypothesis that power does not lie in the position you enjoy but in the ability to influence colleagues, peers, bosses and other minds through your depth of knowledge,innovative ideas and communication. I needed to enhance that power for in India in the foreseeable future public sector would only generate opportunities for growth and that would accrue to anyone with seniority irrespective of your capability, potential or performance.
So, I was in search of new challenges in 1976. How do I make my old parents happier? How do my wife get more happiness? How do I get into an office environment that would make me learn more things at a fast pace as had happened in the first 36 months of my service in the United Bank? And, of course, what else could I do?
I tried behavioral management tools to develop transparent, "u r OK, i am OK" sessions with my wife for better mutual understanding and failed: she would suspect that I was trying to brain-wash her further. My parents were happy that we were staying again with them with our baby son. My wife had been on long leave, beyond the three months' maternity leave she was entitled to. Now she would need to resume office and my son would be taken adequate care at home by my mother and sister-in law during her absence of eight/ nine hours a day. So, one fine morning, she reported back to office. In the evening she announced to me that she would never go back to office as she was unable to bear the few hours of separation with the five-month old child. So, she would immediately resign. And, we got a new challenge cropping up: she desired another kid.
Since my wife wanted to resign from office, we went back to our rented apartment. Jhupa was growing up fast. The landlady who lived on the second-story of the same building, Maya-di and her daughter were very affectionate to all of us. So, was Jyotirmoyee-di, who lived in the adjacent apartment ed. This short, beautiful lady had moved in to this flat recently after she had retired as a Professor of History in a college in Patna in Bihar. She had lost her husband when she was just 13 and then went on to study in school, college, university and had gone to London for higher studies. She was also a guest teacher in the Sarada Mission Women's College nearby. Through her we cam in touch with the College's Principal, Saradaji (Prabrajika ...Prana), a very affectionate Sanyasin of the mission. Jyotirmoyee-di was very fond of Jhupa and she enjoyed see him crawling and then learning to walk, dance and speak. The next door neighbor were also very affectionate to us. One of their relatives, a professor in the university at Gauhati, had come on a visit. Jhupa would try to talk to him from the small balcony that we had opposite the neighbors backyard. One day this professor told my wife that when Jhupa would grow up he would be a mathematician. My wife was very happy.
We would be visiting our parent's residence, 20 minutes away from our apartment, every week. That would make them happy. But I thought I could make my parents happier if we could go for a trip[ together. I was by now entitled to get reimbursement of another family trip to anywhere in India by train. This time I chose Guwahati (formerly Gauhati) in Assam because the 50 minutes air trip from Kolkata to Guwahati was admissible for reimbursement because the train journey involved two nights over an unusually log stretch. So, in August-September 1976, five of us (my wife, mother, father, one-year old son Jhupa and I)flew off to Guwahati, and then straight from the Airport went in taxi to Kamakshya Temple on the top of a hill about 45 minutes away from the airport. At the temple, my parents would offer a special puja worship ceremony that would take about two hours. Then we went in a taxi to the city center and took a bus that would carry us along the sloping and winding roads up the hills to Shillong, the beautiful capital of the State of Meghalaya (Residence in the Clouds). We stayed in a hotel at Shillong for three nights. It was so exhilarating and romantic roaming around the hilly terrain with clouds touching you. It was a romantic environment as well. My father told me the name of a relative whom he knew lived in Shillong. I searched out from the telephone directory (there were not many people who had a telephone in the sparsely populated town those days and the Bengali's among them would have very few) probable Bengali candidates with the surname my father had said and ultimately got in touch with the person's daughter in law and wife: the person concerned was no more but his son and the family were still in Shillong. We visited them one afternoon. Shillong was cold and we had to use blankets at night. One evening when Jhupa was with my mother and she was taking her dinner of mutton-rice, my wife inquired about what Jhupa was doing? My mother replied that he was sleeping under the blanket beside her. Soon, my wife would ask about from where some peculiar sound was coming from and then find Jhupa was enjoying mutton juice from my mothers fingers while enjoying the warmth under the blanket. We would down from Shillong on the fourth day to stay at a hotel in Guwahati for three days. Here Topu had a relative. Again, I tried with the Telephone Directory to find out her cousin's husbands telephone number, contacted them and visited them one evening for an hour or two.
Back to work after 10 days vacation and I started exploring for an opportunity somewhere. I have to get out of United Bank. But before I could do that in November, Chupa, our second child arrived 15 months after
Jhupa, his elder brother. In the case of Jhupa, when the gynecologist had confirmed and I shared the information with my mother, she was so happy. Then, on a Monday morning, as I was getting ready to go to office, Topu said that the arrival date seems to have arrive. I took her to my parents' place and deposited her there. By the time I had come back from office in the evening, mother had already got her admitted to the hospital five minutes walk from the residence and late at night the nurses rang up so that we can walk to the hospital to welcome Jhupa. In the case of Chupa, Topu felt uncomfortable at around 10 PM on a Saturday night as we were just about retiring to bed. We left Jhupa under the care of the neighbor, rushed Topu to another hospital near Shyambazar Five Point Crossing, half an hour away by taxi from my rented apartment, admitted her to the hospital, returned home by mid-night, took back Jhupa from the neighbors and passed the night with Jhupa sleeping for the first time without his mother beside him. In the early morning got up to feed Jhupa, gave him a bath, dressed him up first. Then I also had a bath, took some breakfast and both of us went to my parents' residence. They had already received the telephone call from the hospital about Chupa's arrival in the early hours of Sunday. I left Jhupa with my sister in law, informed my in laws walking down to their residence three minutes away and then proceeded to see Chupa and Topu at the hospital. On Tuesday, I would bring them straight to my parents' residence where we would be staying for the next seek weeks. When Topu arrived home with Chupa, Jhupa received some kind of a shock: as she approached Jhupa to take him in her lap after a hug and kisses, Jhupa suddenly felt shy and jumped on my lap loo kin asking at the infant baby in the cot! That is the beginning of a new journey for the two brother growing up together.
I resumed office on Wednesday and explained my absence for the previous two days sharing the good news with the colleagues. Malay Babu quipped. " Basudeb, you had just been back from the hills a few weeks back and we never imagined that your wife could have been already pregnant! How do you keep secrets?". It was really amazing that my wife's movements and appearance would not give any perceptible signals of pregnancy to visitors or passers-by during the relevant two periods.
But now an opportunity would come for a new work experience, besides a new family experience.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Playing with Analytic Rigor & Terminology: My Unfolding Vogage 068
On an invitation from the Entrepreneur Development Cell of the Indian Institute of Kharagpur, I along with my wife, travel led about 3 hours in a car to reach the IIT campus a few years ago. The organizing students extended a very warm reception and looked after us with care. I was scheduled to address them on the subject of 'Rise of the Knowledge Entrepreneurs' on the following day after lunch. The students took us around the sprawling old campus. We also visited a students' hostel and also the Management School building. Then, it struck me and I requested the students to find out if there was a professor of economics named Partha Basu in the economics department of the Institute and in case he is in station whether I could meet him after my address was over. Partho came to meet us at the IIT Guest House where we were put up, took us to his residence and we had nice time together. He was my colleague at United Bank of India and we were meeting after a gap of 30 years. Parto was two years junior to me in the University and joined the bank probably three years after I did. He was a serious researcher and had lot of problems satisfying himself with the adequacy and representativeness of stratified sampling for a survey he was conducting for an office note. He would accept and write only on the conclusions that come out after satisfying all statistical tests: he could discuss and even have a conviction on a particular hypotheses being true, but would not justify the hypothesis being true unless it has passed the r. rigorous statistical tests of inference. The problem of office communication is that the readers and users of these communication cannot tolerate pleading ignorance. One cannot just say that I did not get support for any of the alternative hypotheses I had tried to test with statistical rig our. One needs to make a personal judgment based on whatever statistical tests one has conducted and whatever theoretical arguments one could marshal for and against all alternative hypothesis, and say this is the most likely Truth and the cost of not accepting this Truth in case if it is really True while formulating policy / making a decision is such and such. Office communications cannot say that one is unable to arrive at a conclusion. The art of drafting an office communication lies in taking the reader through the notes in such a logical sequence that the reader gets increasingly convinced at every stage without any question occurring in the reader's mind so that by the time the person finishes reading the note , the person starts believing that he/ she himself has discovered the Truth contained in the Note and takes responsibility for agreeing with the office Note. Unfortunately, very few researchers would combine their expertise in statistical inference testing and expertise in building a case for a particular hypothesis being true on the basis of knowledge and analysis other than inconclusive statistical tests of inference. Businesses decisions and policies cannot wait for conclusive Truth to arrive,: they are continuously made and revised based on new knowledge and past mistakes identified. Academically, this may look like playing with scientific rigor. I learned that the hard way in the United Bank and later: but serious researchers would interpret that as compromising with scientific rigor. Partho, a very nice gentleman,strongly against male domination over women in families, and with lot of flair for argumentation, would soon leave United Bank and join the Indian Institute of Technology as a economic teacher and would have enjoyed his life thoroughly thereafter.
There was however more things to learn about playing with scientific rigor and terminology. My boss and his boss drew my attention to a two line paragraph from the minutes of a meeting at the Ministry: I do not exactly recall those few sentences but they had recorded that the Secretary or Additional Secretary had advised the banks to formulate models of business plans covering matrix of parameters for rural branches so that these branches turn viable in a shortest possible time. The bosses wanted to know what did the word 'matrix' signify in this context and whether I can build such models. I told them although these sentences conveyed very little extra meaning than they would have if the words 'matrix' and 'parameters' were not used. But I could draw up such a model where I could safely use the terms 'matrix' and 'parameters' and yet these terms would really be insignificant in the essence of building of the model. I also, told them probably the Secretary / Additional Secretary had picked up these terms while visiting the World Bank on an assignment or he must have faintly recalled some terms he had learned while studying mathematics at the undergraduate level. But I could use the terms matrix in the general sense of an array of numbers and parameters as various elements of costs and income rates that along with business activity variables determine bank branches profitability. The bosses relied on my knowledge of undergraduate linear algebra and theory of equations and crossed check if my definitions of matrix and parameter made sense by looking up at the dictionaries. Then, they told me to go ahead and quickly prepare a Note as the Chairman of the Bank had expressed the desire the our Bank should be first to respond on having taken action on this part of the minutes of meeting at the ministry attended by all nationalized bank chairmen and representative of the National Institute of Bank Management. I started my work and also sought their permission to visit a few rural branches so that I could make my model empirically realistic.
I chose the Kolaghat Branch for a five-day visit. It was then a rural / semi-urban location with rural command area. I used to take a daily trip first by bus and by a local train from Howrah station to reach Kolaghat in about 75 minutes. The daily trips cost me in terms of getting an attack of 'conjunctivitis' eye sore that would also pass on my fiance resulting in one of her eyes appearing smaller in size than the other for a weeks before we got married. However, all the five days of my association with the Kolghat branch meant a two hour visit to some parts of the branch's business hinterland for finding prospects of business growth over the next few years, examining the branches past record of performance in these areas and discussing a complete five year business plan for the branch covering deposits of different categories, advances under different categories, staff productivity and manpower deployment, variable and fixed costs and profits. Back to the office, I would access information on all these variables for a sample of relatively new rural branches to mind out the mean and variation in the business activity level and composition, manpower deployment and cost elements for the first three/ four of their operation. Once this information was analyzed, it was easy to develop .internally consistent, feasible and yet challenging time paths of the growth in different business activity levels and the costs, the net interest margins and the profits. The idea was to generate three four alternative time paths of these variables for the first 3 to 5 years of their operations that would be consistent with their reaching the break-even point within that time frame. Thus, I would now have only to present these time profiles, of variable with underlying parameters relating to staff deployment, staff productivity and interest rate margins and etc in the form of an array of numbers that I could call as Matrix 1, Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 as business development plan models to guide the new branch managers to pursue the objectives of meeting priority sector targets as well as reaching break-even point at the earliest. I wrote out the Note and after the bosses were satisfied they sent copies of the Note to the Ministry bureaucrats and to the representative of the National Institute of Bank Management. The latter responded quickly appreciating the work but pointing out that the concept of matrix had not been really applied: he was right, he knew his undergraduate linear algebra well. I was given the task of replying to him, which I did in a language that would close the issue and yet bosses would be satisfied. The bureaucrats would not respond. And, the funny episode of playing with scientific terminology would end with my bosses satisfied.
There was however more things to learn about playing with scientific rigor and terminology. My boss and his boss drew my attention to a two line paragraph from the minutes of a meeting at the Ministry: I do not exactly recall those few sentences but they had recorded that the Secretary or Additional Secretary had advised the banks to formulate models of business plans covering matrix of parameters for rural branches so that these branches turn viable in a shortest possible time. The bosses wanted to know what did the word 'matrix' signify in this context and whether I can build such models. I told them although these sentences conveyed very little extra meaning than they would have if the words 'matrix' and 'parameters' were not used. But I could draw up such a model where I could safely use the terms 'matrix' and 'parameters' and yet these terms would really be insignificant in the essence of building of the model. I also, told them probably the Secretary / Additional Secretary had picked up these terms while visiting the World Bank on an assignment or he must have faintly recalled some terms he had learned while studying mathematics at the undergraduate level. But I could use the terms matrix in the general sense of an array of numbers and parameters as various elements of costs and income rates that along with business activity variables determine bank branches profitability. The bosses relied on my knowledge of undergraduate linear algebra and theory of equations and crossed check if my definitions of matrix and parameter made sense by looking up at the dictionaries. Then, they told me to go ahead and quickly prepare a Note as the Chairman of the Bank had expressed the desire the our Bank should be first to respond on having taken action on this part of the minutes of meeting at the ministry attended by all nationalized bank chairmen and representative of the National Institute of Bank Management. I started my work and also sought their permission to visit a few rural branches so that I could make my model empirically realistic.
I chose the Kolaghat Branch for a five-day visit. It was then a rural / semi-urban location with rural command area. I used to take a daily trip first by bus and by a local train from Howrah station to reach Kolaghat in about 75 minutes. The daily trips cost me in terms of getting an attack of 'conjunctivitis' eye sore that would also pass on my fiance resulting in one of her eyes appearing smaller in size than the other for a weeks before we got married. However, all the five days of my association with the Kolghat branch meant a two hour visit to some parts of the branch's business hinterland for finding prospects of business growth over the next few years, examining the branches past record of performance in these areas and discussing a complete five year business plan for the branch covering deposits of different categories, advances under different categories, staff productivity and manpower deployment, variable and fixed costs and profits. Back to the office, I would access information on all these variables for a sample of relatively new rural branches to mind out the mean and variation in the business activity level and composition, manpower deployment and cost elements for the first three/ four of their operation. Once this information was analyzed, it was easy to develop .internally consistent, feasible and yet challenging time paths of the growth in different business activity levels and the costs, the net interest margins and the profits. The idea was to generate three four alternative time paths of these variables for the first 3 to 5 years of their operations that would be consistent with their reaching the break-even point within that time frame. Thus, I would now have only to present these time profiles, of variable with underlying parameters relating to staff deployment, staff productivity and interest rate margins and etc in the form of an array of numbers that I could call as Matrix 1, Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 as business development plan models to guide the new branch managers to pursue the objectives of meeting priority sector targets as well as reaching break-even point at the earliest. I wrote out the Note and after the bosses were satisfied they sent copies of the Note to the Ministry bureaucrats and to the representative of the National Institute of Bank Management. The latter responded quickly appreciating the work but pointing out that the concept of matrix had not been really applied: he was right, he knew his undergraduate linear algebra well. I was given the task of replying to him, which I did in a language that would close the issue and yet bosses would be satisfied. The bureaucrats would not respond. And, the funny episode of playing with scientific terminology would end with my bosses satisfied.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Researcher-conducive Environment: My Unfloding Voyage 077
In the academic research environment, there maybe more serious interactions among research colleagues- both in their offices / seminar rooms and in the cafetaria. In the Indian Statistical Institute I was therefore a disturbing element, debating issues other than the areas of reserch and leg-pulling gossips. In the area of in-house business research and planning, work went hand-in-hand with gossips and leg-pulling across the work desks and cabins. MaloyBabu would not spare Dr. Chatterjee's claim that his Kasba residence would fall under the Calcutta district once the fly-over connecting Gariahat to the areas to the east across the Railawy line gets over. Those days smoking was freely allowed inside the office and storms over the tea cups was regular part of daily research routine. Mrinal Vaishya would always have a smiling face even if leg-puuling attacks were turned towards him and occasionally make an interesting observation to fuel a laughter among others. He has always been a nice guy. Once both of us went to Gauhati on an official program to conduct training. Being a local person he took me to his paternal residence, got an invitation for me to attend a wedding party at his relative's residence and took me on a tour to various places like Panbazar, Fancybazar, etc. Thirty-years' later he would be at the Bank's headquarters at Kolkata as Chief General Manager and would with great affection help my wife to get the best of services at the Bank's Old Court House Street Branch. He would also introduce her to his colleague Mohanty who continues tio provide her with help in conducting her mother's pension-related banking transactions.
Dr. SC Chatterjee had got his doctorate, probably in Urban Economics, from Warsaw, Poland and before joining the Bank was working for the Calcutta Metropolita Development Authority. He used to narrate to us about his special adventures in Poland. Pratul Mukherjee, a Statistician, also shifted to the Bank for the same organisation that Dr. Chatterjee had served: he was another person who was always smiling and was very affectionate to colleagues. Once he had invited some of us to his residence for an evening party. After three decades I had the opportunity to meet Pratul Babu again at a private music party. As a retired person, he would be enjoying his freedom as a singer - with fame that would help us see him in TV shows.
Maloy Gupta, senior to me in the university by a few years, had been teaching in a college before he joined the Bank, six months later than me. His special 'u' and 'ee' touches to commn Bengali words like 'bheeshon', 'ekhon' still rings in my ears. He specialised in determining the origin of a Bengali by observing the words used in conversation: between 'Manriye' and 'Pariye', he identified my origin in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). As a Ghati, he supported Mohan Soccer team, and my support to East Bengal Soccer Club was linked to my being of Bangal origin. MaloBabu was very particular about treating women as flowers and was highly romantic picking up a flower from the college where he taught economics. Thirty eight years later, I would receive a phone call from him: he had retired from the Bank by then and was the Director of a management school. He had picked up his doctorate degree while he was still working in the Bank.
Every year, before candidates were interviewed for recruitment, boss would tell us this time he would ensure that real good economists and statisticians were selected. What he probably meant was that he would be able to find freshers who would be more quick in adapting to his high standards of drafting office research notes and other written communication than those the Bank had hired in previous years. Every year he failed in his mission. Those who were recruited earlier would feel offended for being categorised as inferior stuff and murmur behind bosses back. Some of us who had experienced this for long would console them and smile away knowing that boss would continue doing this.
I would take this chance to get some brilliant economists to the Bank. I had to pursue a lot with Dipankar Coondoo and Pradeep Maity, seniors at the University and reserach scholars at that time at the Indian Statistical Instiute. Both of them applied for the Bank's job and got selected. Dipankar-da joined. Pradip-da hesitated and then declined after he got a faculty position assurance at the Institute. Dipankar-da worked for a year, got bored and then returned to the Instiute as facaulty member.
Dr. SC Chatterjee had got his doctorate, probably in Urban Economics, from Warsaw, Poland and before joining the Bank was working for the Calcutta Metropolita Development Authority. He used to narrate to us about his special adventures in Poland. Pratul Mukherjee, a Statistician, also shifted to the Bank for the same organisation that Dr. Chatterjee had served: he was another person who was always smiling and was very affectionate to colleagues. Once he had invited some of us to his residence for an evening party. After three decades I had the opportunity to meet Pratul Babu again at a private music party. As a retired person, he would be enjoying his freedom as a singer - with fame that would help us see him in TV shows.
Maloy Gupta, senior to me in the university by a few years, had been teaching in a college before he joined the Bank, six months later than me. His special 'u' and 'ee' touches to commn Bengali words like 'bheeshon', 'ekhon' still rings in my ears. He specialised in determining the origin of a Bengali by observing the words used in conversation: between 'Manriye' and 'Pariye', he identified my origin in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). As a Ghati, he supported Mohan Soccer team, and my support to East Bengal Soccer Club was linked to my being of Bangal origin. MaloBabu was very particular about treating women as flowers and was highly romantic picking up a flower from the college where he taught economics. Thirty eight years later, I would receive a phone call from him: he had retired from the Bank by then and was the Director of a management school. He had picked up his doctorate degree while he was still working in the Bank.
Every year, before candidates were interviewed for recruitment, boss would tell us this time he would ensure that real good economists and statisticians were selected. What he probably meant was that he would be able to find freshers who would be more quick in adapting to his high standards of drafting office research notes and other written communication than those the Bank had hired in previous years. Every year he failed in his mission. Those who were recruited earlier would feel offended for being categorised as inferior stuff and murmur behind bosses back. Some of us who had experienced this for long would console them and smile away knowing that boss would continue doing this.
I would take this chance to get some brilliant economists to the Bank. I had to pursue a lot with Dipankar Coondoo and Pradeep Maity, seniors at the University and reserach scholars at that time at the Indian Statistical Instiute. Both of them applied for the Bank's job and got selected. Dipankar-da joined. Pradip-da hesitated and then declined after he got a faculty position assurance at the Institute. Dipankar-da worked for a year, got bored and then returned to the Instiute as facaulty member.
A Silver Coin: My Unfloding Voyage 066
Socialist banking in India would slowly develop a new Indian economic theory and practice of banking - some kind of a mixture or khitcuhri of banking as it had developed by the British rulers and political and bureaucratic ideas of populist gimmickry and wastage. Nationalisation of 14 major Indian banks in 1969 paved the way for completion of socialistic, state monopoly banking edifice in the country. The nationalised banks became the hotbed of trade unionism that would push up banking costs, declining customer service on the one hand and politically directed lending on the other hand. The statutory liquidity ratio would soon make banks transfer one third of their deposits resources to the State and state-controlled financing agencies as banks were obligated to invest in securities issued by the Government and its approved agencies to the extent of 35% of their incremental deposits every year. In the name of controlling inflation the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, would progressively raise the cash reserve ratio to the 10% region. Of the remaining, 55% of the banks' deposit resources, as much as 40% would be required to be deployed in what was termed as priority sector at concessional rates. Thus the banks' would have freedom to invest at their will only to the extent of Rs 33 out of every Rs 100 raised in the form of deposits. Banks would be permitted to lend some amount by borrowing from the Reserve Bank of India or other refinancing agencies of the Government. The interest rates on deposits and bank loans were fixed by the Reserve Bank of India and that ensured adequate spread to cover high labor costs in banking. There was little to apply mind for formulating an independent monetary policy for inflation control and macro-economic stabilisation in this banking regime.
The banks' continued the practice of understating income to create hidden reserves against probable loan losses and there was no way of knowing whether such secret reserves were adequate (the prudential provisioning norms were introduced only after the reforms in the 1990s when most banks took a heavy burden of loan loss provisioning and write-offs along with income de-recognition against impaired , non-performing assets to an extent that would erode their capital significantly). In 25 years of the Indian economic planning regime, banking had become an instrument of both economic development in accordance with politically dictated priorities as well as a conduit for hiding lost / wasted financial wealth of progressively rising amounts. It is only in the 1990s that the requirements of prudential loan provisioning and income recognition norms caused these huge, accumulated hidden losses to surface as high percentage of non-performing assets in banks.
United Bank of India (UBI) created through the merger in 1950 of four Bengali banks: Comilla Banking Corporation (founded in 1914 in what is now Bangladesh), Bengal Central Bank (founded in 1918), Comilla Union Bank (founded in 1922) and Hooghly Bank (founded in 1932) also completed 25 years of its existence in 1975. As an employee, I received a silver coin commemorating the Silver Jubilee year and there was a grand celebration event at the Bank's headquarters. We were all happy to be part of a Bank that originated in Bengal and survived competition for 25 years - merging into itself or acquiring, Cuttack Bank and Tezpur Industrial Bank in 1961, before getting nationalized with its 17 branches, along with 13 other major Indian commercial banks in July 1969 and then in 1973 acquiring Hindusthan Mercantile Bank and in1976 UBI Narang Bank of India.
Another 25 years later, the Bank would celebrate its Golden Jubilee: I would be so happy to be present at the celebration event at the same building in 2001 as the Chairman of a public sector development bank - thanks to UBI Chairman Biswajit Chowdhury's affectionate invitation.
The banks' continued the practice of understating income to create hidden reserves against probable loan losses and there was no way of knowing whether such secret reserves were adequate (the prudential provisioning norms were introduced only after the reforms in the 1990s when most banks took a heavy burden of loan loss provisioning and write-offs along with income de-recognition against impaired , non-performing assets to an extent that would erode their capital significantly). In 25 years of the Indian economic planning regime, banking had become an instrument of both economic development in accordance with politically dictated priorities as well as a conduit for hiding lost / wasted financial wealth of progressively rising amounts. It is only in the 1990s that the requirements of prudential loan provisioning and income recognition norms caused these huge, accumulated hidden losses to surface as high percentage of non-performing assets in banks.
United Bank of India (UBI) created through the merger in 1950 of four Bengali banks: Comilla Banking Corporation (founded in 1914 in what is now Bangladesh), Bengal Central Bank (founded in 1918), Comilla Union Bank (founded in 1922) and Hooghly Bank (founded in 1932) also completed 25 years of its existence in 1975. As an employee, I received a silver coin commemorating the Silver Jubilee year and there was a grand celebration event at the Bank's headquarters. We were all happy to be part of a Bank that originated in Bengal and survived competition for 25 years - merging into itself or acquiring, Cuttack Bank and Tezpur Industrial Bank in 1961, before getting nationalized with its 17 branches, along with 13 other major Indian commercial banks in July 1969 and then in 1973 acquiring Hindusthan Mercantile Bank and in1976 UBI Narang Bank of India.
Another 25 years later, the Bank would celebrate its Golden Jubilee: I would be so happy to be present at the celebration event at the same building in 2001 as the Chairman of a public sector development bank - thanks to UBI Chairman Biswajit Chowdhury's affectionate invitation.
Monday, April 18, 2011
First Whirlwinds of Expectations & Perceptions: My Unfolding Voyage 065
As a student or as a bachelor, it did not matter much to me as to what others expected of me or perceived of me, so long as I knew clearly about own goals and remained honest to myself. But as I became a part of a family of senior and junior colleagues and peers in the office or as I brought over a girl from elsewhere as part of my own existence in the family at home, I slowly started realising that I are now a suspect in the eyes of all. Without my knowledge, someone so close to me turned envious, jealous or even rebellious against my evolving existence. A few seemed not to be as happy with me as they had been before. Nearly all appeared to start thinking about me in a completely different perspective, treating me as an unfair competitor, a manipulator or attracted to an undesirable camp within the broader family. I seemed to be not fulfilling their (unknown) expectations on me. Some showed up their feeling of being hurt by me, some were explicitly angry with me and I failed to fathom why? I was suddenly in the midst constant whirlwinds of conflicting expectations and perceptions altering my simple, straight-forward relationships with each member of the family into a cobweb of complex and incomprehensible relationships. Three years before I could got exposed to concepts of theory X or theory Y or "I am OK. you are OK", through the middle management executive development training program of United Bank of India, I got caught into those whirlwinds, responding as a novice rational element in what people call family and office politics.
In the process, I got hurt, became more constrained in living freely and started picking up elements of managing the family environment to protect myself from falling into traps laid down by members of the family, especially those who tended to live in their imagination about others.
First about the family in the office. I had left some few pages of manuscript with a steno-typists( stenographer-cum-typists) assistant to type those out and indicated some urgency that the boss may like to look at that Note before I return from a guest-speaker lecture at the Bank's training school that would take me about three hours. When I returned from the school, my assistant colleague complained to me that another colleague of mine who had joined a few months back had demanded that the typing job he had given earlier should be completed first. As a result they had some verbal interaction that was not pleasant. I told him that he need not worry about this incident and he his decision to complete my assignment a little later than what he had planned for did not cause any difficulty to me. I knew that the stenographer colleagues had developed an idea of what assignments flowing to them from different officers had what kind of priority. I kept quiet on the subject and did not raise the issue with anyone or the boss. A few days later, the new entrant officer colleague, two years' junior to me in the University, came to me and told me that he regretted his behavior motivated by his understanding that since I was not his boss, he had interpreted that we were all equal in terms of priority for the stenographers assisting us. He explained that his 'I-am-a-rookie-so are you' was wrong as the priorities arise from the bank's requirements and boss's specifications which were not as clear to him as they were with the stenographer assistant who has been in our department for long. He also said I must be a good man for not having raised the issue of his behaviour among the office colleagues. He would soon become a kind of my fan and younger brother.
Another colleague who had joined the Bank at the same time with the colleague I had just mentioned was also very close to me. Both them used to visit my residence, share food with my wife and me and occasionally stayed overnight with us. He was indeed an intelligent guy but probably slower in picking up the office communication skills. He had also taught me a few yogic aasanaas (exercises). While the Calcutta boy was more demanding in drawing on my affection, the Delhi boy was somewhat reserved in this. We loved them equally. But he probably felt that we were being more affectionate to the Calcutta boy and gradually started distancing from me, though remaining still warm.
A senior colleague who was very affectionate to me used to spend about 40 minutes a day discussing various things. We had gone to restaurants and pictures together. Suddenly, one day he was so cool when I visited him at his desk. He was explicit and curt in communicating to him that I had been using the clues I had been picking up discussing with him against him and in favour of our boss. I was almost in tears. I had lost an affectionate elder because of his sudden change of perception about me though I had not done anything that could hurt his interest. It was just a possibility that our boss would get transferred with higher responsibility and both of us would be sharing the charge of the present boss.That did not happen either: my boss did not go out to become the managing directors of the regional rural bank that our bank was setting up.
At home, the mis-perceptions and misunderstandings created stress on relationships with the parents and they preferred that we shift to a separate residence. I resisted but ultimately shifted to a small flat in Bangur Avenue. It was indeed a boon in disguise: my wife would resume her work, taking the trip to her office accompanying me in the same bus, waiting at the bus stop where we got down till I waived my hand from the 10th floor f our office and then she would take another 7 minute bus trip to reach her office. She would return home earlier than me on most days: otherwise we would return together. We had all the time to go wherever we liked: cinema shows, restaurants, friends places, parents' residences, shopping. Most evening would be so enjoyable and some times we would fall asleep to get awake around 11 PM and then I had rush out to buy some dinner from a nearby eating house. My Mom would visit our flat over lunch one day. She seemed very impressed over our living and felt happy. A few months later we would return to her house, Gurudham, for a four/ five months' stay there.
At office, I would continue to enjoy the affection of most of the seniors. A special friendship would develop with Mr. D. K Bose, the Librarian at the office. It is through interactions with him, I would get to really appreciate how valuable a Librarian could be to a researcher or a seeker of information or knowledge. It was much easier to search books/ documents with the help of a competent and user-friendly librarian. Those days Internet search engines were not available but Mr. Bose will be always helpful in trying to understand what I was looking for and guide me to the accessing the relevant material if these were available in the office library or other libraries he had contact with. It is through him I got to get an idea of the work flow in the library and the essentials of library management. Decade later this would help me in contributing to the efforts of librarians in other offices. By observing his motherly relationships with the books and other resources of his library, I could sense what responses ticks the librarians and get the most out of them: most office library users however tend to ignore the mental make up of librarians, perceive librarians' work as unskilled work and in the process failed to get the best out of the potential services of librarians. The very nature of the work of a librarian, Mr. Bose, had to deal with large number of library users, from the most senior officials of the bank to the most junior and treat them as his valued customers, who would not normally regard an office librarian as a productivity raising agent in the office. And, yet Mr. Bose treated all of them as his valued customers in need of help. Mr. Bose through his own behavior with the library users showed how one could deal with whirlwinds of complex perceptional and expectational relationships in groups in the office and home. For, when a library user did get what he wanted in the library seldom perceived that as a contribution of the librarian and when he failed to get something he wanted perceived the Librarian as useless or unhelpful or inadequately responsive to office colleagues needs.
In the process, I got hurt, became more constrained in living freely and started picking up elements of managing the family environment to protect myself from falling into traps laid down by members of the family, especially those who tended to live in their imagination about others.
First about the family in the office. I had left some few pages of manuscript with a steno-typists( stenographer-cum-typists) assistant to type those out and indicated some urgency that the boss may like to look at that Note before I return from a guest-speaker lecture at the Bank's training school that would take me about three hours. When I returned from the school, my assistant colleague complained to me that another colleague of mine who had joined a few months back had demanded that the typing job he had given earlier should be completed first. As a result they had some verbal interaction that was not pleasant. I told him that he need not worry about this incident and he his decision to complete my assignment a little later than what he had planned for did not cause any difficulty to me. I knew that the stenographer colleagues had developed an idea of what assignments flowing to them from different officers had what kind of priority. I kept quiet on the subject and did not raise the issue with anyone or the boss. A few days later, the new entrant officer colleague, two years' junior to me in the University, came to me and told me that he regretted his behavior motivated by his understanding that since I was not his boss, he had interpreted that we were all equal in terms of priority for the stenographers assisting us. He explained that his 'I-am-a-rookie-so are you' was wrong as the priorities arise from the bank's requirements and boss's specifications which were not as clear to him as they were with the stenographer assistant who has been in our department for long. He also said I must be a good man for not having raised the issue of his behaviour among the office colleagues. He would soon become a kind of my fan and younger brother.
Another colleague who had joined the Bank at the same time with the colleague I had just mentioned was also very close to me. Both them used to visit my residence, share food with my wife and me and occasionally stayed overnight with us. He was indeed an intelligent guy but probably slower in picking up the office communication skills. He had also taught me a few yogic aasanaas (exercises). While the Calcutta boy was more demanding in drawing on my affection, the Delhi boy was somewhat reserved in this. We loved them equally. But he probably felt that we were being more affectionate to the Calcutta boy and gradually started distancing from me, though remaining still warm.
A senior colleague who was very affectionate to me used to spend about 40 minutes a day discussing various things. We had gone to restaurants and pictures together. Suddenly, one day he was so cool when I visited him at his desk. He was explicit and curt in communicating to him that I had been using the clues I had been picking up discussing with him against him and in favour of our boss. I was almost in tears. I had lost an affectionate elder because of his sudden change of perception about me though I had not done anything that could hurt his interest. It was just a possibility that our boss would get transferred with higher responsibility and both of us would be sharing the charge of the present boss.That did not happen either: my boss did not go out to become the managing directors of the regional rural bank that our bank was setting up.
At home, the mis-perceptions and misunderstandings created stress on relationships with the parents and they preferred that we shift to a separate residence. I resisted but ultimately shifted to a small flat in Bangur Avenue. It was indeed a boon in disguise: my wife would resume her work, taking the trip to her office accompanying me in the same bus, waiting at the bus stop where we got down till I waived my hand from the 10th floor f our office and then she would take another 7 minute bus trip to reach her office. She would return home earlier than me on most days: otherwise we would return together. We had all the time to go wherever we liked: cinema shows, restaurants, friends places, parents' residences, shopping. Most evening would be so enjoyable and some times we would fall asleep to get awake around 11 PM and then I had rush out to buy some dinner from a nearby eating house. My Mom would visit our flat over lunch one day. She seemed very impressed over our living and felt happy. A few months later we would return to her house, Gurudham, for a four/ five months' stay there.
At office, I would continue to enjoy the affection of most of the seniors. A special friendship would develop with Mr. D. K Bose, the Librarian at the office. It is through interactions with him, I would get to really appreciate how valuable a Librarian could be to a researcher or a seeker of information or knowledge. It was much easier to search books/ documents with the help of a competent and user-friendly librarian. Those days Internet search engines were not available but Mr. Bose will be always helpful in trying to understand what I was looking for and guide me to the accessing the relevant material if these were available in the office library or other libraries he had contact with. It is through him I got to get an idea of the work flow in the library and the essentials of library management. Decade later this would help me in contributing to the efforts of librarians in other offices. By observing his motherly relationships with the books and other resources of his library, I could sense what responses ticks the librarians and get the most out of them: most office library users however tend to ignore the mental make up of librarians, perceive librarians' work as unskilled work and in the process failed to get the best out of the potential services of librarians. The very nature of the work of a librarian, Mr. Bose, had to deal with large number of library users, from the most senior officials of the bank to the most junior and treat them as his valued customers, who would not normally regard an office librarian as a productivity raising agent in the office. And, yet Mr. Bose treated all of them as his valued customers in need of help. Mr. Bose through his own behavior with the library users showed how one could deal with whirlwinds of complex perceptional and expectational relationships in groups in the office and home. For, when a library user did get what he wanted in the library seldom perceived that as a contribution of the librarian and when he failed to get something he wanted perceived the Librarian as useless or unhelpful or inadequately responsive to office colleagues needs.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Multi-tasking Exposure: My Unfolding Voyage 064
Throughout 1971, I was busy working hard on my office assignments to establish my credentials and enhance my skills as a business economist. The speed with which I tried to complete my assignments and my willingness to handle more than one assignments at a time was amply rewarded by the bosses in exposing me to jobs of various nature, often to be handled simultaneously. By early 1972, I could return to work outside office along with increasing volume of work assigned to me the office. I set out on my next two years' goals: (a) continue to beat colleagues in getting and completing larger number of office assignments than others, (b) speed up my PhD dissertation-related reading and writing, (c) publish some technical paper in the research journal 'Prajnan' of the National Institute of Bank Management in India, and (d) search for a life partner.
With regard to (a), it was easy to achieve for anyone willing to become reliable, dependable in delivering outputs meeting short deadlines. For PhD dissertation, I had already identified the basic books and articles for reading and digesting: these included a Survey article on social cost benefit analysis, a book on collection of articles on the theory and applications of social cost benefit analysis, the OECD manual on project appraisal, the UNIDO Guidelines on Cost Benefit Analysis of projects, a particular issue of a journal published from the then Soviet Union on the cost benefit analysis and project selection in communist centrally planned economies using both mathematics and Marxian vocabulary, and a large number of other articles and books on the subject of cost benefit analysis, articles on trade-off between economic growth and employment growth - both theoretical models and empirical data analysis, articles on project choice criteria in various issues of the Engineering Economists and other books, and etc. Soon I would have charted out my PhD thesis chapter composition: the thesis would have to have an introduction chapter on the Choice problem to be addressed in the framework of Social Cost Benefit Analysis, followed by an extensive survey of literature and another chapter on the inter-relationships between various choice criteria (mathematical formula), and then a Macro economic model that would capture the relationship between employment growth and output (GDP) growth with varying time path of capital intensity and labor productivity, and then propose a weighted linear combination of output growth and employment growth and show how it could be derived from the Macro-economic model of the preceding chapter and workout the shadow wage rate implications in terms of the relative weights given to the national objectives of output growth and employment growth in an economy. The final chapter would deal with the prevailing Indian context of economic and employment growth and how the proposed weighted criterion could be used in the selection of projects for financing by banks with data on a sample of projects actually financed by banks, and then indicating scope for further research. Once the basic structure was available, it was easy even if time consuming to draft the Chapters. And, by the end of 1973, I was ready to deal with a reasonable draft of the entire dissertation for discussions and doing further work based on comments and suggestions by my guide Professor Dr. Deb Kumar Bose.
With regard to technical article on banking for publication, I tried out many topics including bank credit multiplier, but ultimately focused on the topic of Inter-branch Transfer Pricing in public sector banks and repayment scheduling for loans to small business enterprises in tune with the time profile of cash flows. During 1973-75, three of my papers would be published in Prajnan. When the first was published on Single and Dual Rate Transfer pricing policy, even before I could get my copy of the issue of Prajnan, Mr. PK Sen, Deputy General Manager, the third most senior in the top management of the Bank called me to his cabin, showed me the copy of the Prjnan, complimented me for the paper published, told me to continue writing such articles and said that he had already ordered for procurement of sufficient number of additional copies which he wanted to distribute to all directors of the Bank at the ensuing Board meeting. Next day, the Chief Accountant, Mr. Ranjit Dutta (who would later become the Chairman of the Bank) cam down from his office to meet me at my desk and gave the original letter addressed to him by a Chief Officer of the State Bank of India, who had worked with him on a Committee on Banking Costs: in the letter my article and its implications were appreciated. Soon thereafter the Bank itself changed the inter-branch transfer price for its branches: while discussing on the subject, Mr. Ranjit Dutta had argued that a change in the transfer price would improve inter-branch profit comparison but would distort comparison with the immediate past year's profits and Mr. PK Sen retorted to him saying that such an argument would never allow any change at any point of time. A remarkable comment that would guide me as a change agent in the course my career ahead. At the same time, the poor Personnel department officers would still try to explore if they can take me to task for not taking the Bank's permission before publishing an article. I knew that given the top management's favourable view they might to have the courage to complain against me. Still, I warned them that if they had read the relevant staff conduct rules of the Bank carefully, they should have noted that my article being of a purely technical, scientific nature and had not used any confidential information of the bank, I was not required to take the Bank's prior permission. I had started learning about the control phobia and jealous nature of Personnel departments of public sector firms.
My fourth task was to find a suitable life partner quickly. There were two criteria: (a) I would know her to be of the nature that best suits me and (b) that I would be most attracted by her appearance. But girls just do not fly in the sky to be shot at for capture. First, I tried if my Mom would find one quickly. She did not seem to be in a hurry. I identified some girl she knew and identified some peculiar criteria that would help my Mom to identify the same girl. She identified one such good looking girl but rejected her because the girl's mother had died of cancer. So, I had to take up the job and ultimately married one whose father died of cancer 11 years after my marriage, while the girl rejected by my mother ran away from home with her Romeo. I was saved on both counts: my father-in-law did not get inflicted by cancer before my marriage and my mother rejected a girl who would soon fly away.
But it was not that easy to get hold of a partner. It is just by mere chance in the spring of 1972 that I got formally introduced to her by a friend when we went together to enjoy the stage performance of a common friend who requested me to write a review of their play performance for publication in a daily newspaper. At the end of play, we walked along the street for about 15 minutes and then shook hands to part away. But I knew that she would have fallen for me. Next morning, she was there at the bus stop to travel together on my and her way to the office. Then it all began flying. I was getting to know her better, though I had seen this girl for the previous eight years smartly roaming around our lanes in her bicycle with her braided-hair twin-tails dancing in the air. She bothered less about my idiosyncrasies and abnormalities that she would have to bear with later. My spreading rumour that my marriage has already been fixed with someone else only helped intensify our relationships and after weeks of being together at movie halls, taxis, restaurants and her residence over the next six months, we agreed to marry on the understanding that covered the following three:
(a) that she would quit job for ever (actually, she did quit, then joined again in her job in the Mass Communications Division of the Govt. of West Bengal after a year handing over her salary cheques to me every month as my fees),
(b) that we would remain childless to enjoy our love (actually we didn't and so he decided on her own to finally quit job), and
(c) that she would dress in Saree's the way I prefered (actually she did but within a decade would start shifting away from Saree's to Salwar Kameez as her main attire). Given all these understanding and knowledge, it was worth taking the risk that I knew that I got the partner of my life. I would then advise her to play appropriate strategic threats to her father to agree to our proposal to get married and God had to advise her father during his meditation that she should readily agree. My mother would not agree till knew who was my chosen girl, I would not tell her about the girl before she gave her consent. After a few days of tussle, my father intervened saying that if I had already made the final choice of the bride, there was no point in wasting time. Her parents cam to our residence to make the proposal and dates were finalized. I would then take my mother along to their residence to meet my love. We married in the Spring of 1973 and, I happily lived thereafter.
With regard to (a), it was easy to achieve for anyone willing to become reliable, dependable in delivering outputs meeting short deadlines. For PhD dissertation, I had already identified the basic books and articles for reading and digesting: these included a Survey article on social cost benefit analysis, a book on collection of articles on the theory and applications of social cost benefit analysis, the OECD manual on project appraisal, the UNIDO Guidelines on Cost Benefit Analysis of projects, a particular issue of a journal published from the then Soviet Union on the cost benefit analysis and project selection in communist centrally planned economies using both mathematics and Marxian vocabulary, and a large number of other articles and books on the subject of cost benefit analysis, articles on trade-off between economic growth and employment growth - both theoretical models and empirical data analysis, articles on project choice criteria in various issues of the Engineering Economists and other books, and etc. Soon I would have charted out my PhD thesis chapter composition: the thesis would have to have an introduction chapter on the Choice problem to be addressed in the framework of Social Cost Benefit Analysis, followed by an extensive survey of literature and another chapter on the inter-relationships between various choice criteria (mathematical formula), and then a Macro economic model that would capture the relationship between employment growth and output (GDP) growth with varying time path of capital intensity and labor productivity, and then propose a weighted linear combination of output growth and employment growth and show how it could be derived from the Macro-economic model of the preceding chapter and workout the shadow wage rate implications in terms of the relative weights given to the national objectives of output growth and employment growth in an economy. The final chapter would deal with the prevailing Indian context of economic and employment growth and how the proposed weighted criterion could be used in the selection of projects for financing by banks with data on a sample of projects actually financed by banks, and then indicating scope for further research. Once the basic structure was available, it was easy even if time consuming to draft the Chapters. And, by the end of 1973, I was ready to deal with a reasonable draft of the entire dissertation for discussions and doing further work based on comments and suggestions by my guide Professor Dr. Deb Kumar Bose.
With regard to technical article on banking for publication, I tried out many topics including bank credit multiplier, but ultimately focused on the topic of Inter-branch Transfer Pricing in public sector banks and repayment scheduling for loans to small business enterprises in tune with the time profile of cash flows. During 1973-75, three of my papers would be published in Prajnan. When the first was published on Single and Dual Rate Transfer pricing policy, even before I could get my copy of the issue of Prajnan, Mr. PK Sen, Deputy General Manager, the third most senior in the top management of the Bank called me to his cabin, showed me the copy of the Prjnan, complimented me for the paper published, told me to continue writing such articles and said that he had already ordered for procurement of sufficient number of additional copies which he wanted to distribute to all directors of the Bank at the ensuing Board meeting. Next day, the Chief Accountant, Mr. Ranjit Dutta (who would later become the Chairman of the Bank) cam down from his office to meet me at my desk and gave the original letter addressed to him by a Chief Officer of the State Bank of India, who had worked with him on a Committee on Banking Costs: in the letter my article and its implications were appreciated. Soon thereafter the Bank itself changed the inter-branch transfer price for its branches: while discussing on the subject, Mr. Ranjit Dutta had argued that a change in the transfer price would improve inter-branch profit comparison but would distort comparison with the immediate past year's profits and Mr. PK Sen retorted to him saying that such an argument would never allow any change at any point of time. A remarkable comment that would guide me as a change agent in the course my career ahead. At the same time, the poor Personnel department officers would still try to explore if they can take me to task for not taking the Bank's permission before publishing an article. I knew that given the top management's favourable view they might to have the courage to complain against me. Still, I warned them that if they had read the relevant staff conduct rules of the Bank carefully, they should have noted that my article being of a purely technical, scientific nature and had not used any confidential information of the bank, I was not required to take the Bank's prior permission. I had started learning about the control phobia and jealous nature of Personnel departments of public sector firms.
My fourth task was to find a suitable life partner quickly. There were two criteria: (a) I would know her to be of the nature that best suits me and (b) that I would be most attracted by her appearance. But girls just do not fly in the sky to be shot at for capture. First, I tried if my Mom would find one quickly. She did not seem to be in a hurry. I identified some girl she knew and identified some peculiar criteria that would help my Mom to identify the same girl. She identified one such good looking girl but rejected her because the girl's mother had died of cancer. So, I had to take up the job and ultimately married one whose father died of cancer 11 years after my marriage, while the girl rejected by my mother ran away from home with her Romeo. I was saved on both counts: my father-in-law did not get inflicted by cancer before my marriage and my mother rejected a girl who would soon fly away.
But it was not that easy to get hold of a partner. It is just by mere chance in the spring of 1972 that I got formally introduced to her by a friend when we went together to enjoy the stage performance of a common friend who requested me to write a review of their play performance for publication in a daily newspaper. At the end of play, we walked along the street for about 15 minutes and then shook hands to part away. But I knew that she would have fallen for me. Next morning, she was there at the bus stop to travel together on my and her way to the office. Then it all began flying. I was getting to know her better, though I had seen this girl for the previous eight years smartly roaming around our lanes in her bicycle with her braided-hair twin-tails dancing in the air. She bothered less about my idiosyncrasies and abnormalities that she would have to bear with later. My spreading rumour that my marriage has already been fixed with someone else only helped intensify our relationships and after weeks of being together at movie halls, taxis, restaurants and her residence over the next six months, we agreed to marry on the understanding that covered the following three:
(a) that she would quit job for ever (actually, she did quit, then joined again in her job in the Mass Communications Division of the Govt. of West Bengal after a year handing over her salary cheques to me every month as my fees),
(b) that we would remain childless to enjoy our love (actually we didn't and so he decided on her own to finally quit job), and
(c) that she would dress in Saree's the way I prefered (actually she did but within a decade would start shifting away from Saree's to Salwar Kameez as her main attire). Given all these understanding and knowledge, it was worth taking the risk that I knew that I got the partner of my life. I would then advise her to play appropriate strategic threats to her father to agree to our proposal to get married and God had to advise her father during his meditation that she should readily agree. My mother would not agree till knew who was my chosen girl, I would not tell her about the girl before she gave her consent. After a few days of tussle, my father intervened saying that if I had already made the final choice of the bride, there was no point in wasting time. Her parents cam to our residence to make the proposal and dates were finalized. I would then take my mother along to their residence to meet my love. We married in the Spring of 1973 and, I happily lived thereafter.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Secular, Gender-equal Banking: My Unfolding Voyage 63
Indian Constitution implied India was socialist democratic republic. I had felt socialistic meant equal treatment and opportunities to each and every national / citizen, irrespective of income status, caste creed, gender and religion. Somewhat superfluously the Constitution was amended to make India secular as well in the 1970s, instead of making the State and public sector non-religious. The State continues to support religious communities of different types. Constitution has not been amended to make India gender-equal: the voting rights accrue at the age of 18 irrespective of gender, but men cannot marry before they are 21 years of age - three years later than a female is legally entitled to marry. But a public sector bank must practice secularism, gender-equality, backward caste/ tribe reservation and spread the use of National language Hindi. United Bank of India as a nationalized bank must contribute to these characteristic objectives of the State. When the first women employee joined the Bank in the mid-1970s, it was a radical departure from the traditions. United Bank Employees organised Hindu's Saraswati Puja while being secular and lead by Marxist leaders.
Some Hindu Temples practice gender equality but others do not. Some God men practice gender equality, others do not. Many religions and communities do not believe in gender equality. Individual families do not practice gender equality. So, the State has difficulty in calling itself gender-independent or relion independent. So, it calls itself secular, rather than being religion-independent. The Bank however encouraged its employees to go to different places or visit native village once in four years accompanied by their families by reimbursing the cost of transport up to a certain monetary limit, I took advantage of this facility twice while on the rolls of the Bank. On the first occasion, within six months of my marriage, we went to Hyderabad along with my parents. This is first time I had gone to keep a promise I had made to my wife before we married. She wanted to visit the abode of a Godman. We stayed with my cousin Ashokda for in two spans of 3 days each and in between travelled to and fro Puttapurthy where we stayed for two nights and three days. Puttaparthy is a small village with Prshanta Nilyam (Satya Sai Baba's abode of Great Peace) as the main centre of its attraction. We saw Satya Sai Baba from a distance as he strolled around through the crowd of devotees, followers, and visitors sitting on the lawns. My wife, Pramita (Topu) felt delighted for having fulfilled her desire to see Sai Baba at his abode. We also attended the evening prayers there. It was a great time that we spent there in cold winter, living in a rented slum's room, eating out in make-shift way side restaurants and observing the foreign visitors eating South Indian food. Satya Sai Baba is the only living Godman in my life time. He preached no religion but love, though his prayers are mostly offerings to Hindu God and His different deity forms. I heard lot of criticisms and controversies about Satya Sai Baba before and after visiting him. These however did not appeal much to me. The fact that appealed to me is that here was a person who attracted so many devotees and followers including people of various religion from various countries and allowing the rich among them to spend their wealth and energy for various philanthropic work in the ares of medicare, education and spreading message of love practising secularism and gender-equality without being part of the State or being an elected democratic leader or as an instrument of State policy. We returned safely and as per schedule to Hyderabad despite our worry following the mid-night accident that we experienced when the bus in which we were going to Puttapartti fell down from the road to a low-lying farm land on the side- a sudden fall through the air by about 4 feet and wait there for 5 hours for the bus to get repaired.
On our way back from, we visited my elder brother who was then working in limestone quarrying company in Birmitrapur, near Rourkela. After staying with my brother's family for two days, we returned back to Kolkata leaving my parents with my brother for an extended stay in Birmitrapur.
I was convinced that gender-equality and secularism was not something that need to be a part of State's policy or practised under directive by banks as an instrument of State policy. Legislation and legislators cannot imbibe the love that make them practice equanimity and benefit the society: they are in the business of selling concepts of various discrimination's and distinctions in the name of equality, freedom and socialism.
Some Hindu Temples practice gender equality but others do not. Some God men practice gender equality, others do not. Many religions and communities do not believe in gender equality. Individual families do not practice gender equality. So, the State has difficulty in calling itself gender-independent or relion independent. So, it calls itself secular, rather than being religion-independent. The Bank however encouraged its employees to go to different places or visit native village once in four years accompanied by their families by reimbursing the cost of transport up to a certain monetary limit, I took advantage of this facility twice while on the rolls of the Bank. On the first occasion, within six months of my marriage, we went to Hyderabad along with my parents. This is first time I had gone to keep a promise I had made to my wife before we married. She wanted to visit the abode of a Godman. We stayed with my cousin Ashokda for in two spans of 3 days each and in between travelled to and fro Puttapurthy where we stayed for two nights and three days. Puttaparthy is a small village with Prshanta Nilyam (Satya Sai Baba's abode of Great Peace) as the main centre of its attraction. We saw Satya Sai Baba from a distance as he strolled around through the crowd of devotees, followers, and visitors sitting on the lawns. My wife, Pramita (Topu) felt delighted for having fulfilled her desire to see Sai Baba at his abode. We also attended the evening prayers there. It was a great time that we spent there in cold winter, living in a rented slum's room, eating out in make-shift way side restaurants and observing the foreign visitors eating South Indian food. Satya Sai Baba is the only living Godman in my life time. He preached no religion but love, though his prayers are mostly offerings to Hindu God and His different deity forms. I heard lot of criticisms and controversies about Satya Sai Baba before and after visiting him. These however did not appeal much to me. The fact that appealed to me is that here was a person who attracted so many devotees and followers including people of various religion from various countries and allowing the rich among them to spend their wealth and energy for various philanthropic work in the ares of medicare, education and spreading message of love practising secularism and gender-equality without being part of the State or being an elected democratic leader or as an instrument of State policy. We returned safely and as per schedule to Hyderabad despite our worry following the mid-night accident that we experienced when the bus in which we were going to Puttapartti fell down from the road to a low-lying farm land on the side- a sudden fall through the air by about 4 feet and wait there for 5 hours for the bus to get repaired.
On our way back from, we visited my elder brother who was then working in limestone quarrying company in Birmitrapur, near Rourkela. After staying with my brother's family for two days, we returned back to Kolkata leaving my parents with my brother for an extended stay in Birmitrapur.
I was convinced that gender-equality and secularism was not something that need to be a part of State's policy or practised under directive by banks as an instrument of State policy. Legislation and legislators cannot imbibe the love that make them practice equanimity and benefit the society: they are in the business of selling concepts of various discrimination's and distinctions in the name of equality, freedom and socialism.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Business Strategy & Policy: My Unfolding Voyage 62
The association with the work relating to the director's report increasingly gave me the impression that the Bank really had not even an implicit long-term vision or goal that would explain the rationale of its management. The top management were more interested and focussed on how to please the sole owner, the Government of India, in particular, the State Minister of Finance for Banking and the Additional Sectretary Banking, especially in meeting targets of performane in relation to priority sector fiance, branch expansion and the like. There was not even a desire to be a much larger bank than the close competitors. At that time, the top most banks in terms of business were the State Bank of India, Central Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Bank of India and Bank of Baroda, followed by United Commercial Bank and the United Bank of India. Canara Bank and Syndicate Bank ranked further down the ranking table. United Bank of India top management seemed to be satisfied with their rank and felt better if the Bank could just beat the United Commercial Bank in terms of depoits level: they would not envision a future of the Bank being among the top three banks in the country: for the owners of the nationalised banks, it did not matter which bank had achieved whuch size so long as all the banks were growing every year at a reasonably fast pace to bring more resourses under the control and direction of the Government.
The lack of an explicit or implicit (underlying) long-term vision got reflected in the absence of long-term strategies and plans and focus on the immidiate future: as one Chairman of the Bank had indicated that his horizon of planning for the Bank was limited by his remaining two years or so to retirement - the owners would not appoint a Chairman who was relatively young, nor would allow even a successful Chairman to continue after the Government stipulated retirement age of 58 or 60 years. The Syndicate and Canara Bank Chairmen had been slightly younger when they were appointd and could envision for a longer period: they would soon come up the ranking table, leaving United Bank of India behind.
Business analysis and policy work in the Bank therefore was focussed on immediate requirements of changes in methods and systems, recruitment and training and deployment of staff to achive the targets set by the owners, rather than on career planning, radical reorientation in organisation structure, diversification outside the contours of the Government policy, innovation and enterprise. One knew that one's growth opportunity in the Bank would be decided by how fast the Bank is able to grow rather than by the challanges taken up to transform the Bank to realize a clearly articulate long-term vision.
Business policy making therefore was more a convenience of prevailing environment rather than part of a long-term strategy. Maybe two illustrations would make it easier to explain this personal observation. The Bank could not have made any serious effort to improve customer service: while most of individual employees were sincere and could operate on higher productivity, the left-wing politician influenced trade unions (one for class III and another for class IV employees) would not allow higher productivity any where and assured the empployees of negotiating progressively higher wages for progressively lower work effort and greater leisure time at office. Personnel management was weak and compromising in the face of Marxists (do not produce surplus value for the owners and customers to appropriate large surplus value). The Bank would further abandon nursing an idea of dealing with the employee trade unions after nationalisation because the ruling political party would not like bank employees to go on various forms of strikes.
Yet, when the ruling political party desired, after the declaration of Emergency by the then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the Bank would immediately initiate steps to improve customer service. One such step was to assign each officer in the headquarters to visit two branch offices and report on their standards of customer service to the top management at the headquarters. I had chosen two branches: one close to my residence and the other close to my office. I had convinced the bosses that instead of wasting time on week days, I would visit each branch on one Saturdays every month. The bosses readily agreed because that would ensure my availabilty at the office forw regular work
on all working days except the two saturdays - half-a-day working hours on Saturdays for banks. I had worked out my own inspection visit plans: check attendance register just after the branch opened in the morning, record time taken to serve customers withdrawing deposits or depositing cash/ cheques in their account, just by observing a sample of customers movement from thei entry to the branch and noting also the time one has to wait in the queue, would have a brief inspection of certain books of accounts and share a cup of tea with the branch manager discussing with him about his plans and progress in regard to customer service, and then write out my report there itself - all within a space of 150 minutes. Then I would quietly, slip out of the branch, meet my wife who would come over from our home, share some food in a restaurant and enter the theatre nearby for a matinee show. There were no bosses around to interfere in the name of exigencies of sudden urgent workflow: I got my compensation for those few days the bosses made me fail my appointments with my fiance. On one occasion, we went to see the Zeenat Aman starrer Satyam, Sivam, Sundraram but could not get the tickets and went to see another Satrughna Sinha Hindi film in the theatre close by. The power supply failed in the theatre after thec film had progressed past the mid-way: so, we collected the money refunded by the theatre hall, proceede quickly back to the theatre showing Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram to find the next show about to start had no seats available when someone came to us offered to re-sell two tickets as their friend had not turned up to see the movie. That day we enjoyed one and a half fim shows at the cost of one film viweing fees.
The customer service visits went on for about four months and customer service fell back to the levels that the employee unions were happy with: what happened to our reports, we could not get any feedback.
Being an instrument of the State policy, the politicians would not allow banks to be involved in anything that would come under criticism for hurting the common citizens. Potato prices rose sharply one particular year and there was a view commonly held by political parties that this has happend because of cornering potatos housed in cold starages by profiteering traders. Naturally, the board members, especially the representatives of the Government desired an anaysis of the policy of the Bank in respect of financing cold storages. I was instructed to make a survey based study on the extent and impact of the Bank's financing of cold storages. A very friendly credit officer in the tradional large advaces department took me around several bank-financed cold storages in the major potato grwoing belts in Hoogly and nearby districts or rural Bengal for three days. We had nice night-stay arrangements awaiting for us to make us comfortable. We moved in a robust Ambassador car from cold storage to cold storage. The cold storage managers/ owners explained the methods of operation with special reference to their customers who stored potatos in their storages and the period of inflow into the cold storage, the period of complete air-conditioning without any inflow or outflow of potatoes and then the period of withdrwal of potatos in phases from the cold storages. I also had discussion with the nearby branch managers who explained the method of financing of potato growers from the stage of seeding through selling of a part of the crop yield, storing in their cottages a part of the yield for sale over the next two - three months and putting the remaining part of the produce in the cold storage for selling at higher prices after four-five months.
The basic economics was simple but politicians, common people and the educated elite seldom apply their logical mind if prices go up sharply for an essential food item. Bank financing of cold storages had nothing to with the rise in prices of potatos during September- October period: rather, in the absence of the cold storages prices would have been far higher than they would otherwise be during September to early January when the new crop is harvested. Pointing all these out in my Note to the Board, I showed how financing the cold storages the Bank had helped moderate the sharp rise in the potato prices after three months' of harvesting the crop output, reduced the incidence of rotten potatos in farmers' household storages, increased the production of potatos and increased the income of the potato growers. I also pointed out that the occasional sharp rises in the price of potatos during September-November was partly due to sharp rise in demand due to succession of festivities and partly due to manipulation by certain potato wholesale traders in Kolkata with part-ownership of some coldstorages who would buy from the farmers holding stocks in the cold storages to gain control over stocks. My recommendation was to increase bank financing for new cold storages and for financing farmers growing potatos so as to both increase the overall availabilty and make the wholesale trade in potato more competitive and contestable. The Bank's directors felt comfortable that the Bank would be able to convince the politicians that bank financing of cold storages was not the reason for rise in potato price. It is another mater, that during the last three and a half decade period since then, the same problem of sharp rise in potato prices would recur in certain years at times of high seasonal demand surge: a few big wholesale traders would continue to be successful in ensuring effective barriers to entry of new wholesalers in potato as in the case of fish and the political parties would find existence of such oligopolies helpful to them. If public sector banks were really to be used as instruments of State policy, the structure of wholsale trade could have been made substantially more competitive and contestable. United Bank of India on its part could not envision how it could grow it business in poptato cultivation, storage and trade.
The lack of an explicit or implicit (underlying) long-term vision got reflected in the absence of long-term strategies and plans and focus on the immidiate future: as one Chairman of the Bank had indicated that his horizon of planning for the Bank was limited by his remaining two years or so to retirement - the owners would not appoint a Chairman who was relatively young, nor would allow even a successful Chairman to continue after the Government stipulated retirement age of 58 or 60 years. The Syndicate and Canara Bank Chairmen had been slightly younger when they were appointd and could envision for a longer period: they would soon come up the ranking table, leaving United Bank of India behind.
Business analysis and policy work in the Bank therefore was focussed on immediate requirements of changes in methods and systems, recruitment and training and deployment of staff to achive the targets set by the owners, rather than on career planning, radical reorientation in organisation structure, diversification outside the contours of the Government policy, innovation and enterprise. One knew that one's growth opportunity in the Bank would be decided by how fast the Bank is able to grow rather than by the challanges taken up to transform the Bank to realize a clearly articulate long-term vision.
Business policy making therefore was more a convenience of prevailing environment rather than part of a long-term strategy. Maybe two illustrations would make it easier to explain this personal observation. The Bank could not have made any serious effort to improve customer service: while most of individual employees were sincere and could operate on higher productivity, the left-wing politician influenced trade unions (one for class III and another for class IV employees) would not allow higher productivity any where and assured the empployees of negotiating progressively higher wages for progressively lower work effort and greater leisure time at office. Personnel management was weak and compromising in the face of Marxists (do not produce surplus value for the owners and customers to appropriate large surplus value). The Bank would further abandon nursing an idea of dealing with the employee trade unions after nationalisation because the ruling political party would not like bank employees to go on various forms of strikes.
Yet, when the ruling political party desired, after the declaration of Emergency by the then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the Bank would immediately initiate steps to improve customer service. One such step was to assign each officer in the headquarters to visit two branch offices and report on their standards of customer service to the top management at the headquarters. I had chosen two branches: one close to my residence and the other close to my office. I had convinced the bosses that instead of wasting time on week days, I would visit each branch on one Saturdays every month. The bosses readily agreed because that would ensure my availabilty at the office forw regular work
on all working days except the two saturdays - half-a-day working hours on Saturdays for banks. I had worked out my own inspection visit plans: check attendance register just after the branch opened in the morning, record time taken to serve customers withdrawing deposits or depositing cash/ cheques in their account, just by observing a sample of customers movement from thei entry to the branch and noting also the time one has to wait in the queue, would have a brief inspection of certain books of accounts and share a cup of tea with the branch manager discussing with him about his plans and progress in regard to customer service, and then write out my report there itself - all within a space of 150 minutes. Then I would quietly, slip out of the branch, meet my wife who would come over from our home, share some food in a restaurant and enter the theatre nearby for a matinee show. There were no bosses around to interfere in the name of exigencies of sudden urgent workflow: I got my compensation for those few days the bosses made me fail my appointments with my fiance. On one occasion, we went to see the Zeenat Aman starrer Satyam, Sivam, Sundraram but could not get the tickets and went to see another Satrughna Sinha Hindi film in the theatre close by. The power supply failed in the theatre after thec film had progressed past the mid-way: so, we collected the money refunded by the theatre hall, proceede quickly back to the theatre showing Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram to find the next show about to start had no seats available when someone came to us offered to re-sell two tickets as their friend had not turned up to see the movie. That day we enjoyed one and a half fim shows at the cost of one film viweing fees.
The customer service visits went on for about four months and customer service fell back to the levels that the employee unions were happy with: what happened to our reports, we could not get any feedback.
Being an instrument of the State policy, the politicians would not allow banks to be involved in anything that would come under criticism for hurting the common citizens. Potato prices rose sharply one particular year and there was a view commonly held by political parties that this has happend because of cornering potatos housed in cold starages by profiteering traders. Naturally, the board members, especially the representatives of the Government desired an anaysis of the policy of the Bank in respect of financing cold storages. I was instructed to make a survey based study on the extent and impact of the Bank's financing of cold storages. A very friendly credit officer in the tradional large advaces department took me around several bank-financed cold storages in the major potato grwoing belts in Hoogly and nearby districts or rural Bengal for three days. We had nice night-stay arrangements awaiting for us to make us comfortable. We moved in a robust Ambassador car from cold storage to cold storage. The cold storage managers/ owners explained the methods of operation with special reference to their customers who stored potatos in their storages and the period of inflow into the cold storage, the period of complete air-conditioning without any inflow or outflow of potatoes and then the period of withdrwal of potatos in phases from the cold storages. I also had discussion with the nearby branch managers who explained the method of financing of potato growers from the stage of seeding through selling of a part of the crop yield, storing in their cottages a part of the yield for sale over the next two - three months and putting the remaining part of the produce in the cold storage for selling at higher prices after four-five months.
The basic economics was simple but politicians, common people and the educated elite seldom apply their logical mind if prices go up sharply for an essential food item. Bank financing of cold storages had nothing to with the rise in prices of potatos during September- October period: rather, in the absence of the cold storages prices would have been far higher than they would otherwise be during September to early January when the new crop is harvested. Pointing all these out in my Note to the Board, I showed how financing the cold storages the Bank had helped moderate the sharp rise in the potato prices after three months' of harvesting the crop output, reduced the incidence of rotten potatos in farmers' household storages, increased the production of potatos and increased the income of the potato growers. I also pointed out that the occasional sharp rises in the price of potatos during September-November was partly due to sharp rise in demand due to succession of festivities and partly due to manipulation by certain potato wholesale traders in Kolkata with part-ownership of some coldstorages who would buy from the farmers holding stocks in the cold storages to gain control over stocks. My recommendation was to increase bank financing for new cold storages and for financing farmers growing potatos so as to both increase the overall availabilty and make the wholesale trade in potato more competitive and contestable. The Bank's directors felt comfortable that the Bank would be able to convince the politicians that bank financing of cold storages was not the reason for rise in potato price. It is another mater, that during the last three and a half decade period since then, the same problem of sharp rise in potato prices would recur in certain years at times of high seasonal demand surge: a few big wholesale traders would continue to be successful in ensuring effective barriers to entry of new wholesalers in potato as in the case of fish and the political parties would find existence of such oligopolies helpful to them. If public sector banks were really to be used as instruments of State policy, the structure of wholsale trade could have been made substantially more competitive and contestable. United Bank of India on its part could not envision how it could grow it business in poptato cultivation, storage and trade.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Visionless Plan of Wasteful Democratic Slavery: My Unfolding Voyage 61
Please the owners' representatives (the Minister, the concerned bureaucrats and the Parliamentarians on Committees that evaluate the Bank's performance. That seemed to be the only justification for the existence of the management of a nationalized Bank. The Bank did not have to have a long-term vision, mission, goal, strategy and plan of its own, although most individuals had their own long-range plan and in most cases these plans assumed that the Bank as the life-long employer will grow from strength to strength. I had my own long-term vision and goals for myself as would most human beings have. As part of that personal long-term plan, I got the job in the Bank, explored potential partner whom I could fall in love with, marry her and raise children. We fell in love sometime after we first met in 1971 and went through lot of romantic encounters during which the senior colleagues deliberately played occasional mischief to make me fail appointments with my love while she kept waiting for me for hours at the pre-specified restaurant or fair: they had overheard of our plan to meet after the office hours and cooked up some urgent work just before the closing hours and there being no mobile phones those days I had no opportunity to communicate my inability to meet her as per agreed schedule ( I would have opportunity to get compensated later).
We got married in 1973 after successfully managing through appropriate strategies and tactics, the initial hurdles arising out of reluctance of parents on both sides to allow an inter-caste marriage. We had full enjoyment of just being together for two years and a half to welcome the arrival of our first child, Sowmdeb in 1975. At the same time, I worked hard enough drafting various chapters of my PhD dissertation, meeting and discussing, on ten successive Saturday afternoons, my thesis adviser- supervisor, Dr. Deb Kumar Bose at his residence while enjoying the tea and snacks arranged by Mrs Bose along with her affection. Mrs. Bose provided good support my decision to marry when I did despite Dr. Bose's concern that marrying before completing the dissertation could be a distracting disturbance: she pointed out that they themselves had got married before Dr. Bose completed his PhD. Over the ten weeks, I spent considerable time revising the draft chapters a number of times based on Dr. Bose's comments and suggestions and also meeting and discussing the drafts with another Professor Dr. Sanjit Bose who provided very interesting inputs for embellishment of the dissertation and finally getting their approval for submission. I was up against time running out fast: I had conceived my PhD dissertation before I had joined the Bank while my wife Pramita (Topu) conceived our elder son much later and was about to deliver. I rushed through the proof reading and finally delivered my PhD dissertation to the Indian Statistical Institute virtually at the same time as my wife delivered her first child..
No one had any idea of the long-term vision that I were implementing. But if one would have tracked my behaviour and actions over time, one would have got some rough idea of my long-range plan and strategies, I had the opportunity to decipher the long run vision, mission, goals, strategies and plans, if any, of United Bank of India in the early 1970s by analysing the Banks actions and behavior. This opportunity came primarily by way of my involvement in the preparation of Annual Director's Report for six successive years. In the first year of my service at the Bank, my involvement was marginal: draft the first five/ six paragraphs of the small sections of economic, monetary policy and banking sector environment for the year under report, and proof reading of entire report including the tables and the accounts statements, This gave an insight into what the Directors' Annual Report & Accounts document sought to cover and convey. The major sections of the Directors report contained the performance of the Bank in aggregate terms of deposits, bank advances, branch expansion and profits and fairly detailed presentation on the Banks achievement in the areas of farm finance, small, cottage and tiny industries credit, credit to artisans and handicapped people and small businesses, advances to major industrial sectors and infrastructure, realisation of targets in credit deployment in the priority sectors, extension of coverage of hitherto unbanked rural and urban areas and of course launching of new and innovative schemes of financing priority sectors and weaker sections. Besides, there would be paragraphs on employment creation within the Bank and through extension of credit, development and promotional efforts undertaken to promote economic development in the areas of operation of the Bank. There would be appropriately placed photographs of important events in the banks premises during the year. There would be a designer consultant to assist us in deciding the layout, the use of different fronts and colours, etc. Pretty interesting publishing work with boring proof reading and correction and working late hours in the office as well as at the printer's office just before the final print order is given.
Detailed drafts of material would come from various departments like the farm finance department, small scale industries department, the publicity and public relations department, the credit department, the branch expansion department, the personnel department, the accounts department, the Management Development Department, the Staff Training College, and etc. Besides, we had all the Statistical MIS information readily available. The job was now to sift through the available material and prepare a running first draft and then edit and re-edit before the bosses make their fine touch editing and provides guidance on what additional items of important developments that got missed out. Being involved in the preparation of the Annual Report provided considerable insights to what was going on in the Bank's mind. The interactions with the officers in various departments provided an window to what was going on in their minds and what they were trying to achieve, besides establishing wonderful friendships (I had quite a few affectionate senior colleagues in Farm Finance Department like Dr. SN Ghoshal, Dr. A Roy who took me around in one of his visits to branch offices in North 24-Parganas for a day-long experience with farm credit officers in branches, and Dr. BV Jha. The interaction with the bosses and the top management on the draft reports revealed how they were looking at the present and the future.
On one occasion, I was sent to discuss the draft approved by the Board with the Government's nominee on the Board of the Bank. He was at that time a Joint Secretary in the Department of Banking in the Ministry of Finance, became Additional Secretary soon and later became the Chairman of the country's largest bank, the State Bank of India. He had a few small suggestions to make on the draft Annual Report, but I felt that he had got discouraged to see a less than 30 year old bank officer being responsible for the Bank's Director's report because when I went to meet him he wanted to confirm that if I were the bank officer dealing with the Directors' Report. More than three decades later I had a chance to meet him: he was still very agile and active with keen interest in Indian economics.
One year during the period of Emergency declared by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi's Government, the Chairman of the Bank carried a few advance print copies of the Annual Report to present them to the Minister of State for Finance (Banking) and joint/ additional secretaries of the Govt.'s banking department. Even as more copies of the Annual Report were being bound by the printer's binders, call came from New Delhi that led to stop the process. It was around noon on a Saturday. Chairman conveyed what the Minister had suggested: (a) have the cover of the Annual Report re-designed and printed so that the inside back cover has a kangaroo-pocket hold, and (b) produce an attractive small booklet showing how the Bank was implementing the 20-point socio-economic development programme announced by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and insert that booklet in the kangaroo-pocket on the inside back cover of the Annual report. Chairman instructed that the Annual Report along with its kangaroo pocket booklet should be available in three days. I was given the task to prepare the booklet. The problem was that on the major parts of Indira Gandhi's 20-point program that were relevant to banking were already covered in the Annual Report. So, we needed both rewording, rephrasing of existing material already used plus additional material and photographs. It was decided that we would work the whole of Sunday to finalise the booklet and send to the printers Sunday evening. I went home, searched out from my table a three page document of the Government that contained the 20 point programme. With the quotations from that document I made a rough layout and draft of our kangaroo-pocket booklet with about 16/ 17 points that could be considered relevant to baking by some stretched imagination. It would roughly be a 24 page booklet. On Sunday, the farm finance and small industry finance departments provided additional material to help me put flesh into my basic structure of the booklet. Bosses edited my drafts and suggested inclusion of some more information that they had considered relevant. The artist- designer was called in and we sent the material to the printers. Monday and Tuesday we worked on proof-reading and further editing. By Wednesday evening, adequate number of printed copies of the Annual Report with the booklet in its kangaroo-pocket were available for sending to Delhi so that the Minister and his officials could get pleased with the great work done by the United Bank, even if that meant some wasteful expenditure on document printing.
It was not just a case of pleasing the King and his men during an Emergency Rule and suspension of democracy: public sector had to be instruments of government publicity as well. Public sector must also be for the benefit of politicians adoring the Parliament as representatives of the common people. They would be on Bharat Darshan tour to review the performance of the public sector undertakings and visit all cities where these companies were headquartered, enjoying there hospitality and the banks and other companies they would review would be highly obliged if these great persons accepted valuable gifts and city tours organized by these public sector units. Some of the Parliament Committee members would need special escorts, besides a car to roam around the city (Kolkata in the case of United Bank of India) for shopping and enquiring. One driver reported later that he had been asked about the location of the red light areas. The costs did not matter, the managements thought: after all, the visitors were the owners' representatives. It is a small expenditure once in a while: much more was being spent on questions asked by the Parliamentarians on banking as information would be sought from banks that they would have to collect from far flung branches through telexes and telegrams, compile them for further compilation at the Banking Department of the Government and based on that appropriate written or oral reply would be given by the Minister in the Parliament. Dealing with material to be sent to government in response to Parliamentary questions would bore me also much later in life: one of the most wasteful activity that the public sector and the Nation would continue to bear for unimaginative design of Parliamentary democratic procedures!
We got married in 1973 after successfully managing through appropriate strategies and tactics, the initial hurdles arising out of reluctance of parents on both sides to allow an inter-caste marriage. We had full enjoyment of just being together for two years and a half to welcome the arrival of our first child, Sowmdeb in 1975. At the same time, I worked hard enough drafting various chapters of my PhD dissertation, meeting and discussing, on ten successive Saturday afternoons, my thesis adviser- supervisor, Dr. Deb Kumar Bose at his residence while enjoying the tea and snacks arranged by Mrs Bose along with her affection. Mrs. Bose provided good support my decision to marry when I did despite Dr. Bose's concern that marrying before completing the dissertation could be a distracting disturbance: she pointed out that they themselves had got married before Dr. Bose completed his PhD. Over the ten weeks, I spent considerable time revising the draft chapters a number of times based on Dr. Bose's comments and suggestions and also meeting and discussing the drafts with another Professor Dr. Sanjit Bose who provided very interesting inputs for embellishment of the dissertation and finally getting their approval for submission. I was up against time running out fast: I had conceived my PhD dissertation before I had joined the Bank while my wife Pramita (Topu) conceived our elder son much later and was about to deliver. I rushed through the proof reading and finally delivered my PhD dissertation to the Indian Statistical Institute virtually at the same time as my wife delivered her first child..
No one had any idea of the long-term vision that I were implementing. But if one would have tracked my behaviour and actions over time, one would have got some rough idea of my long-range plan and strategies, I had the opportunity to decipher the long run vision, mission, goals, strategies and plans, if any, of United Bank of India in the early 1970s by analysing the Banks actions and behavior. This opportunity came primarily by way of my involvement in the preparation of Annual Director's Report for six successive years. In the first year of my service at the Bank, my involvement was marginal: draft the first five/ six paragraphs of the small sections of economic, monetary policy and banking sector environment for the year under report, and proof reading of entire report including the tables and the accounts statements, This gave an insight into what the Directors' Annual Report & Accounts document sought to cover and convey. The major sections of the Directors report contained the performance of the Bank in aggregate terms of deposits, bank advances, branch expansion and profits and fairly detailed presentation on the Banks achievement in the areas of farm finance, small, cottage and tiny industries credit, credit to artisans and handicapped people and small businesses, advances to major industrial sectors and infrastructure, realisation of targets in credit deployment in the priority sectors, extension of coverage of hitherto unbanked rural and urban areas and of course launching of new and innovative schemes of financing priority sectors and weaker sections. Besides, there would be paragraphs on employment creation within the Bank and through extension of credit, development and promotional efforts undertaken to promote economic development in the areas of operation of the Bank. There would be appropriately placed photographs of important events in the banks premises during the year. There would be a designer consultant to assist us in deciding the layout, the use of different fronts and colours, etc. Pretty interesting publishing work with boring proof reading and correction and working late hours in the office as well as at the printer's office just before the final print order is given.
Detailed drafts of material would come from various departments like the farm finance department, small scale industries department, the publicity and public relations department, the credit department, the branch expansion department, the personnel department, the accounts department, the Management Development Department, the Staff Training College, and etc. Besides, we had all the Statistical MIS information readily available. The job was now to sift through the available material and prepare a running first draft and then edit and re-edit before the bosses make their fine touch editing and provides guidance on what additional items of important developments that got missed out. Being involved in the preparation of the Annual Report provided considerable insights to what was going on in the Bank's mind. The interactions with the officers in various departments provided an window to what was going on in their minds and what they were trying to achieve, besides establishing wonderful friendships (I had quite a few affectionate senior colleagues in Farm Finance Department like Dr. SN Ghoshal, Dr. A Roy who took me around in one of his visits to branch offices in North 24-Parganas for a day-long experience with farm credit officers in branches, and Dr. BV Jha. The interaction with the bosses and the top management on the draft reports revealed how they were looking at the present and the future.
On one occasion, I was sent to discuss the draft approved by the Board with the Government's nominee on the Board of the Bank. He was at that time a Joint Secretary in the Department of Banking in the Ministry of Finance, became Additional Secretary soon and later became the Chairman of the country's largest bank, the State Bank of India. He had a few small suggestions to make on the draft Annual Report, but I felt that he had got discouraged to see a less than 30 year old bank officer being responsible for the Bank's Director's report because when I went to meet him he wanted to confirm that if I were the bank officer dealing with the Directors' Report. More than three decades later I had a chance to meet him: he was still very agile and active with keen interest in Indian economics.
One year during the period of Emergency declared by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi's Government, the Chairman of the Bank carried a few advance print copies of the Annual Report to present them to the Minister of State for Finance (Banking) and joint/ additional secretaries of the Govt.'s banking department. Even as more copies of the Annual Report were being bound by the printer's binders, call came from New Delhi that led to stop the process. It was around noon on a Saturday. Chairman conveyed what the Minister had suggested: (a) have the cover of the Annual Report re-designed and printed so that the inside back cover has a kangaroo-pocket hold, and (b) produce an attractive small booklet showing how the Bank was implementing the 20-point socio-economic development programme announced by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and insert that booklet in the kangaroo-pocket on the inside back cover of the Annual report. Chairman instructed that the Annual Report along with its kangaroo pocket booklet should be available in three days. I was given the task to prepare the booklet. The problem was that on the major parts of Indira Gandhi's 20-point program that were relevant to banking were already covered in the Annual Report. So, we needed both rewording, rephrasing of existing material already used plus additional material and photographs. It was decided that we would work the whole of Sunday to finalise the booklet and send to the printers Sunday evening. I went home, searched out from my table a three page document of the Government that contained the 20 point programme. With the quotations from that document I made a rough layout and draft of our kangaroo-pocket booklet with about 16/ 17 points that could be considered relevant to baking by some stretched imagination. It would roughly be a 24 page booklet. On Sunday, the farm finance and small industry finance departments provided additional material to help me put flesh into my basic structure of the booklet. Bosses edited my drafts and suggested inclusion of some more information that they had considered relevant. The artist- designer was called in and we sent the material to the printers. Monday and Tuesday we worked on proof-reading and further editing. By Wednesday evening, adequate number of printed copies of the Annual Report with the booklet in its kangaroo-pocket were available for sending to Delhi so that the Minister and his officials could get pleased with the great work done by the United Bank, even if that meant some wasteful expenditure on document printing.
It was not just a case of pleasing the King and his men during an Emergency Rule and suspension of democracy: public sector had to be instruments of government publicity as well. Public sector must also be for the benefit of politicians adoring the Parliament as representatives of the common people. They would be on Bharat Darshan tour to review the performance of the public sector undertakings and visit all cities where these companies were headquartered, enjoying there hospitality and the banks and other companies they would review would be highly obliged if these great persons accepted valuable gifts and city tours organized by these public sector units. Some of the Parliament Committee members would need special escorts, besides a car to roam around the city (Kolkata in the case of United Bank of India) for shopping and enquiring. One driver reported later that he had been asked about the location of the red light areas. The costs did not matter, the managements thought: after all, the visitors were the owners' representatives. It is a small expenditure once in a while: much more was being spent on questions asked by the Parliamentarians on banking as information would be sought from banks that they would have to collect from far flung branches through telexes and telegrams, compile them for further compilation at the Banking Department of the Government and based on that appropriate written or oral reply would be given by the Minister in the Parliament. Dealing with material to be sent to government in response to Parliamentary questions would bore me also much later in life: one of the most wasteful activity that the public sector and the Nation would continue to bear for unimaginative design of Parliamentary democratic procedures!
Business Forecasting to Planning & Budgetting: My Unfolding Voyage 60
Mihir joined the Bank about two years after I did. He was a brilliant student and had just got his Masters from The Dibrugarh University in Assam. He was a very docile and lovable colleague. One of his first assignment was to be with me in the annual exercises of forecasting the Indian bank deposits over the next year and arrive at a reasonable forecast of the Bank's deposits. Providing credible forecast of business activity levels had been a key traditional responsibility of business economists. This job at the Bank was done by our bosses earlier and now they had assigned the task to the new recruits. The methodologies were established by the bosses earlier: run a simple time series regression on total bank deposits and extrapolate by a year; then, apply the bank's share in total bank deposits to arrive at the forecast of deposits for United Bank. In the Board Note just add some paragraphs on macro-economic trends and outlook to justify that the projections were reasonable.
Mihir and I had to embellish the Board Note on the subject this time. We also ran time series regression of total bank deposits but we tried several models of curve filling and arrive at alternate projections. The time series regression was rather easy to handle computationally with Facit machines. But trying multiple regression models relating bank deposits to macro-economic variables like GDP, Savings rate and money supply was rather difficult not only because the bank did not have a mainframe computer (the workmen unions were violently against computerisation of bank work for the false threat of loss of existing and potential employment - a perception cultivated by the communist trade union leaders in West Bengal in particular) and the personal computers were yet to reach India at that time, but also because the macro-economic data were available those days with considerable time delay to enable projection of those variable in the future. Still we did try simple three variable models of linear regression. As for the Bank's deposit forecast we ran both time series regression and model of shares of the Bank in incremental deposits having regard to the expansion of branch network. Form the plethora of projections, judgement was applied to arrive a small interval estimate of the Banking system's and the Banks deposit levels. This was then broken down into fixed, current and savings deposits based on past patterns adjusted for banks special deposit mobilisation efforts and the locations of the new branches in terms of potential for deposits. Once the deposit levels were available, it was easy to arrive at the credit or advances forecast given the statutory liquidity ratio, the cash reserve ratio, the desired credit deposit ratio. Once these were done, along with net interest margins and known fixed costs and variable costs, it was a small computation step to arrive at projections of the Bank's before tax profits.
Mihir did bulk of the computational work, I just wrote out the Note containing our findings and projections (being an M.Sc in statistics Mihir had more experience in handling facit machines for statistical calculations including standard errors of estimates, while despite having descriptive statistics at the undergraduate level and Mathematical Statistics and Econometrics at the graduate level, I was the most reluctant computational hand). The Note duly edited and approved by the Board finally reached the General Manager (the number two in the bank) who called me up to get briefed. He ended the briefing session by exclaiming: 'Your forecast seems OK: but I had arrived at similar figures without doing such a whole lot of statistical work that you people did.' I replied with part diplomacy:' Yes, Sir. You got the forecast based on your intuition based on long tears' of experience: we just provided a scientific rationale'. He appreciated my reply with a smile and let me go. I went back to give the feedback to my boss and Mihir who had just fallen in love with a girl and protested against my advise that hold your brain above your heart of love to tread carefully along the path of love. Eighteen months later, when we reached office in the morning we found Mihir's lifeless body on the roads: he had leapt out of the 10th floor window under the burden of a heavy heart. We are all very saddened with this tragic incident.
Given the forecast deposit and credit levels the Bank's chief accountant would now work out branch wise targets of deposits and credit and the priority sector credit chief would communicate the priority sector wise credit targets. This system however would change soon. Business Planning and Budgeting would be arrived at through a two way communication. The National Institute of Bank Management had just started its campaign for introduction of Performance Budgeting. They were holding workshops on the subject in different banks. About 15 of my colleagues from different departments and offices participated in the workshop arranged exclusively for United Bank. After the workshop, I along with one of my colleagues in my department were given the task of implementing performance budgeting. The entire process of budgeting from the initial headquarter communication on goal setting to formulation of budgets at the branch level and deliberations over them at the district development and regional offices to final two day deliberations and finalisation of the budgets at the central office with regional managers: also, the formats for budgeting and guidelines on environment scanning for identification of business potential and translating them into performance budgets covering all business aspects including manpower, costs and profits were required to be explained to all. We therefore prepared a performance buget manual/ guideline document. The printed copies of this document was sent to all branch. district development and regional offices and all departments. We organised special training programs at various centres to explain the performance budgeting philosophy and techniques with examples. It was a great experience dealing with so many people from so many places and then compiling the aggregate performance budget of the Bank. At last the exercise in business forecasting got related to the exercise of evolving branch wise performance budgets through a two way communication process (top-down and bottoms-up).
But something more on planning was yet to be initiated. Business Plans and Performance Budgets were essentially for one yaer period at a time with quarterly or monthly pasing wherever necessary for effective monitoring of the realisation of the performance budgets and business plans. There was not articulated and documeted and deliberated medium- and long-range business plan as yet. So even as performance budgeting system got introduced we got initiated the process of long-range planning with the consultancy assistance of the National Instiute of Bank Management. In the first round they were interviewing and discussing with the bank's top officials. I had heard that the Chairman of the Bank confronted them with a question:' Since I am going to retire in two years from now, how do you expect me to answer how I expect the Bank to look like five tear hence?' I had left the services of United Bank of India soon thereafter to pursue long-term planning exposure elsewhere.
Mihir and I had to embellish the Board Note on the subject this time. We also ran time series regression of total bank deposits but we tried several models of curve filling and arrive at alternate projections. The time series regression was rather easy to handle computationally with Facit machines. But trying multiple regression models relating bank deposits to macro-economic variables like GDP, Savings rate and money supply was rather difficult not only because the bank did not have a mainframe computer (the workmen unions were violently against computerisation of bank work for the false threat of loss of existing and potential employment - a perception cultivated by the communist trade union leaders in West Bengal in particular) and the personal computers were yet to reach India at that time, but also because the macro-economic data were available those days with considerable time delay to enable projection of those variable in the future. Still we did try simple three variable models of linear regression. As for the Bank's deposit forecast we ran both time series regression and model of shares of the Bank in incremental deposits having regard to the expansion of branch network. Form the plethora of projections, judgement was applied to arrive a small interval estimate of the Banking system's and the Banks deposit levels. This was then broken down into fixed, current and savings deposits based on past patterns adjusted for banks special deposit mobilisation efforts and the locations of the new branches in terms of potential for deposits. Once the deposit levels were available, it was easy to arrive at the credit or advances forecast given the statutory liquidity ratio, the cash reserve ratio, the desired credit deposit ratio. Once these were done, along with net interest margins and known fixed costs and variable costs, it was a small computation step to arrive at projections of the Bank's before tax profits.
Mihir did bulk of the computational work, I just wrote out the Note containing our findings and projections (being an M.Sc in statistics Mihir had more experience in handling facit machines for statistical calculations including standard errors of estimates, while despite having descriptive statistics at the undergraduate level and Mathematical Statistics and Econometrics at the graduate level, I was the most reluctant computational hand). The Note duly edited and approved by the Board finally reached the General Manager (the number two in the bank) who called me up to get briefed. He ended the briefing session by exclaiming: 'Your forecast seems OK: but I had arrived at similar figures without doing such a whole lot of statistical work that you people did.' I replied with part diplomacy:' Yes, Sir. You got the forecast based on your intuition based on long tears' of experience: we just provided a scientific rationale'. He appreciated my reply with a smile and let me go. I went back to give the feedback to my boss and Mihir who had just fallen in love with a girl and protested against my advise that hold your brain above your heart of love to tread carefully along the path of love. Eighteen months later, when we reached office in the morning we found Mihir's lifeless body on the roads: he had leapt out of the 10th floor window under the burden of a heavy heart. We are all very saddened with this tragic incident.
Given the forecast deposit and credit levels the Bank's chief accountant would now work out branch wise targets of deposits and credit and the priority sector credit chief would communicate the priority sector wise credit targets. This system however would change soon. Business Planning and Budgeting would be arrived at through a two way communication. The National Institute of Bank Management had just started its campaign for introduction of Performance Budgeting. They were holding workshops on the subject in different banks. About 15 of my colleagues from different departments and offices participated in the workshop arranged exclusively for United Bank. After the workshop, I along with one of my colleagues in my department were given the task of implementing performance budgeting. The entire process of budgeting from the initial headquarter communication on goal setting to formulation of budgets at the branch level and deliberations over them at the district development and regional offices to final two day deliberations and finalisation of the budgets at the central office with regional managers: also, the formats for budgeting and guidelines on environment scanning for identification of business potential and translating them into performance budgets covering all business aspects including manpower, costs and profits were required to be explained to all. We therefore prepared a performance buget manual/ guideline document. The printed copies of this document was sent to all branch. district development and regional offices and all departments. We organised special training programs at various centres to explain the performance budgeting philosophy and techniques with examples. It was a great experience dealing with so many people from so many places and then compiling the aggregate performance budget of the Bank. At last the exercise in business forecasting got related to the exercise of evolving branch wise performance budgets through a two way communication process (top-down and bottoms-up).
But something more on planning was yet to be initiated. Business Plans and Performance Budgets were essentially for one yaer period at a time with quarterly or monthly pasing wherever necessary for effective monitoring of the realisation of the performance budgets and business plans. There was not articulated and documeted and deliberated medium- and long-range business plan as yet. So even as performance budgeting system got introduced we got initiated the process of long-range planning with the consultancy assistance of the National Instiute of Bank Management. In the first round they were interviewing and discussing with the bank's top officials. I had heard that the Chairman of the Bank confronted them with a question:' Since I am going to retire in two years from now, how do you expect me to answer how I expect the Bank to look like five tear hence?' I had left the services of United Bank of India soon thereafter to pursue long-term planning exposure elsewhere.
Getting Trained & Training Collagues: My Unfloding Voyage 59
United Bank of India had its own staff training college at a two-storied old Bungalow-type building on the Rashbehari Avenue between Triangular Park and Gariahat Crossing in the southern part of Kolkata. I understand that the Training College moved to a new location later. At that time, a retired State Bank senior official was the Principal of the College. The college was primarily for technical training in different operational work areas for the Bank's own employees but also just started providing induction training to new recruit specialised officers like economists, statisticians, farm credit managers, engineers, chartered and cost accountants and officers promoted from the ranks. Since there were not enough new recruits available for induction training, I had to wait for about a year to go to the college for the seven or 10 day programme. In the meanwhile, the Bank's headquarters had moved from its old premises at Clive Ghat Street, a lane parallel to the Fairlie Place lane to the north, connecting the Netaji Subhas Chandra Road and the Strand Road on the banks of the Ganges (Hooghly) river that separated Kolkata from the district of Howrah. We shifted to the Ban's new 16-storied building (the tallest building in Kolkata at that time) at 10, Old Court House Street on the south-east corner of the Dalhousie Square (renamed later as Binay Badal Dinesh or BBD Bagh) and very close to the state Governor's House. The building was state of the art at that time with honey-comb louver roofing in each floor, multiple spacious automatic lifts, wide lobbies and a sprawling terace garden on the third floor where the top four officials of the Bank had their offices along with the Board Room. We were located on the 10th floor.
I had undergone two programs at the College. Both the induction training and the subsequent executive development program at the college were very interesting. Besides good launch and snacks, the program covered all aspects of banking from Banking Regulation and Development Act, Reserve Bank of India Act, Negotiable Instrument Act and Bank Nationalisation Act and other laws relevant to banking to deposit mobilisation, credit appraisal and disbursement, from deposit and borrower account operation to bank accounting, and from foreign exchange operations to staff rules as also elements of bank management like inter-personal relationship, delegation of powers, bank marketing and leadership. Most speakers were from the senior bank officials and training officers, but external specialists also covered some aspects. Bank's Deputy General Manage, PL Sen talked on bank marketing at a pre-dinner session: Indian bankers those days were not exposed to concepts of marketing management as applied to banking. The program induced me to become a regular reader of the content page and select articles in the Harvard Business Review issues available at the Bank's Library. Harvard Business School would be on my voyage two decades later.
Soon the level of activity of the Training College would increase manifold with the large step up in recruitment of staff and officers required for both the headquarters, regional offices and new district development offices and the fast expanding network of branch offices, especially in rural and semi-urban areas. Even junior officers like me had to be deployed as part-time visiting faculty in areas like economic and banking business environment. I had become a regular speaker at the Training College since my bosses did not have time to act as part-time faculty. And, given the huge load of training new recruits, we had not been spared for further training, except once after the first promotion. The Bank was reluctant to send new recruits for training in executive development programs at management institutes of at the RBI staff training college in Mumbai.
Yet, I was fortunate enough to be at the RBI Staff Training College in Prabhadevi, Mumbai within 30 months of joining the Bank. The Reserve Bank had organized an Workshop on the implementation of the New Basic Statistical Returns (BSR) for banks and their branches. My senior colleague, Rajat Gupta, a First Class First M.Sc in Statistics of the University of Calcutta and in-charge of United Bank of India's statistical management information operations and I were deputed to attend the program: i did not know at that time that I was destined not to attend any regular training program at RBI Staff Training College in my life but would be guest speaker at its programs decades later. But the trip to Mumbai for the first time for attending the BSR workshop turned out to be a great personal event. Rajat-da told me that we were eligible to travel only by train to Mumbai (roughly 36-hours journey each way) but reserved tickets were not available because of the short notice that we had got, we need bosses' approval to go by air (two and a half hour flight each way). We got approval from the bosses, applied for three days leave to stay back at Mumbai and bought an extra return ticket at the cost of Rs.800 or so (about 75% of my monthly remuneration at that time) and flew off for honeymoon to Mumbai with my partner whom I married three months back: stayed in a small hotel for two nights before an elder cousin and her husband forced us to shift to their residence at Mazagaon Dock, visited all sight-seeing places in Mumbai from South Bombay to the North Bombay and suburbs with a car at our disposal, courtesy Mr. Adya, Head of the Bank's branch at the Oberoi Towers Complex (now called Trident Hotel), moving through the rows of the coconut trees in the Juhu Beach (it was still at that time as it had been pictured in the Hindi Movies of the 1950s and 1960s, making some purchases here and there including at the Crawford market. Ten years later we would come back to Mumbai and live there for the next two decades.
United Bank of India would soon give me another opportunity soon. The Staff training college would organise a training program in a hotel at Digha, one of the best holidaying centre in West Bengal on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. I was invited to give a guest lecture. My wife and I had enjoyed the two nights trip to Digha for the first time, just a few months after our trip to Mumbai.
I had undergone two programs at the College. Both the induction training and the subsequent executive development program at the college were very interesting. Besides good launch and snacks, the program covered all aspects of banking from Banking Regulation and Development Act, Reserve Bank of India Act, Negotiable Instrument Act and Bank Nationalisation Act and other laws relevant to banking to deposit mobilisation, credit appraisal and disbursement, from deposit and borrower account operation to bank accounting, and from foreign exchange operations to staff rules as also elements of bank management like inter-personal relationship, delegation of powers, bank marketing and leadership. Most speakers were from the senior bank officials and training officers, but external specialists also covered some aspects. Bank's Deputy General Manage, PL Sen talked on bank marketing at a pre-dinner session: Indian bankers those days were not exposed to concepts of marketing management as applied to banking. The program induced me to become a regular reader of the content page and select articles in the Harvard Business Review issues available at the Bank's Library. Harvard Business School would be on my voyage two decades later.
Soon the level of activity of the Training College would increase manifold with the large step up in recruitment of staff and officers required for both the headquarters, regional offices and new district development offices and the fast expanding network of branch offices, especially in rural and semi-urban areas. Even junior officers like me had to be deployed as part-time visiting faculty in areas like economic and banking business environment. I had become a regular speaker at the Training College since my bosses did not have time to act as part-time faculty. And, given the huge load of training new recruits, we had not been spared for further training, except once after the first promotion. The Bank was reluctant to send new recruits for training in executive development programs at management institutes of at the RBI staff training college in Mumbai.
Yet, I was fortunate enough to be at the RBI Staff Training College in Prabhadevi, Mumbai within 30 months of joining the Bank. The Reserve Bank had organized an Workshop on the implementation of the New Basic Statistical Returns (BSR) for banks and their branches. My senior colleague, Rajat Gupta, a First Class First M.Sc in Statistics of the University of Calcutta and in-charge of United Bank of India's statistical management information operations and I were deputed to attend the program: i did not know at that time that I was destined not to attend any regular training program at RBI Staff Training College in my life but would be guest speaker at its programs decades later. But the trip to Mumbai for the first time for attending the BSR workshop turned out to be a great personal event. Rajat-da told me that we were eligible to travel only by train to Mumbai (roughly 36-hours journey each way) but reserved tickets were not available because of the short notice that we had got, we need bosses' approval to go by air (two and a half hour flight each way). We got approval from the bosses, applied for three days leave to stay back at Mumbai and bought an extra return ticket at the cost of Rs.800 or so (about 75% of my monthly remuneration at that time) and flew off for honeymoon to Mumbai with my partner whom I married three months back: stayed in a small hotel for two nights before an elder cousin and her husband forced us to shift to their residence at Mazagaon Dock, visited all sight-seeing places in Mumbai from South Bombay to the North Bombay and suburbs with a car at our disposal, courtesy Mr. Adya, Head of the Bank's branch at the Oberoi Towers Complex (now called Trident Hotel), moving through the rows of the coconut trees in the Juhu Beach (it was still at that time as it had been pictured in the Hindi Movies of the 1950s and 1960s, making some purchases here and there including at the Crawford market. Ten years later we would come back to Mumbai and live there for the next two decades.
United Bank of India would soon give me another opportunity soon. The Staff training college would organise a training program in a hotel at Digha, one of the best holidaying centre in West Bengal on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. I was invited to give a guest lecture. My wife and I had enjoyed the two nights trip to Digha for the first time, just a few months after our trip to Mumbai.
Of Meeting Briefs and Speeches: My Unfolding Voyage 58
Senior bankers were generally very busy with routine work of considering and approving decisions, conducting and attending business meetings, and meeting important clientele and dignitaries in office or elsewhere: as is true of top and senior management outside banking industry, they could afford and little time to read long notes and lot of materials on relevant to their work and decision-making. So, they insisted on short, brief office notes as well as briefing by their juniors on the content of the notes and other meeting information briefs given to them. They generally had little to time to prepare their own speeches / articles to be delivered at meetings, inaugural functions or published in business journals or business books. Economists traditionally provided this help to the top management. But there were two categories among the top managers. The first group consisted very few who would dictate their articles and ask the economists to edit the draft for improvement and comment and based on the feedback would themselves finalise the speech or article, or discuss on the various points relevant on the issue at hand, ask the economist to arrange the points in a small piece of paper and then dictate the article or deliver the speech extempore. Most top managers were however in the second group: they basically depended on the draft prepared by the economist, would seldom change a word or a sentence there and read out their prepared speeches or send the article for publication. It was rather easy to deal with the second group and the economist would have lot of freedom in composition. The better speech writers would put themselves into the shoes of the senior banker and compose the speeches and articles from the perspective of that level of management.
Fortunately, I had opportunity work with both categories in the United Bank of India. Since the first set of exposures in this area were with the first category of independent and articulate top bankers, it was easy to get a hang of their preferences and strong views. United Bank of India Chairman B K Dutta used to dictate his articles / speeches himself. Once I had edited his first draft but he was extremely disappointed and angry about my :removing the words 'ludicurous' and 'ridiculous' as adjective to certain actions/ ideas of certain sections of the society: he was very particular about which words expressed his thoughts adequately. Once after reading the copy of one of the issues of the journal of the National Institute of Bank Management, he sent it to us with an attached slip with his note: 'This is not only a wastage of national resources but a drag on clear thinking'. I had thought then that the nature of topics covered in the journal and the highly mathematical content of the articles in that issue had failed to meet the expectations he had on the Bank Management Institute.
Mr. Dutta was a member of the State Planning Board of West Bengal. One late afternoon he called me and gave my a 300+page-document prepared by the Board. It was the State's plan approach paper setting out the priorities and major development programmes. He asked to give him a short brief next morning as he had to attend the Planning Board's meeting later in the afternoon that day. I went home, worked for three-hours the same evening and prepared a 10-page executive summary of the document in my own handwriting and gave him the manuscript. He glanced at that and told his secretary to get it typed. Next day morning, he called me to give back these documents and appreciated my effort in quickly producing an useful executive summary.
Mr. PK Sen, the deputy General Manager of the Bank, was the third senior most top official of the Bank, after the Chairman and the General Manager (those days deputy general managers and general managers were very few in banks unlike today when you have hundreds of them: deputy general managers in those days were roughly equivalent to deputy managing directors or executive directors of nationalised banks today). He always spoke extempore and seldom signed an article. He was a good speaker. But he would discuss on varying subjects whenever there was any chance: once he discussed with me about inflation and in the course of discussion asked how I had been adjusting my family expenditure in the face of high inflation in the early 1970s after the first oil shock. I told him that I was trying to shift to lower priced substitutes wherever possible like shifting from milk-based butter to soya-based margarine. He sarcastically commented that the soyabean product was not at all tasty to go with the breakfast toast. On another occasion he called me and asked me to give hum on just one side of a single sheet of paper all relevant information on a small European country's economy to help him prepare for a meeting he had on the next day with a trade minister of that country. He emphasised that my brief should on a single quarto-size paper and I need not write long sentences. I asked for a favour: I would write the brief on one side of a quarto-size paper but would not get it typed as this would leave lot of space blank because of margins on both sides and between the lines. He agreed. I picked up a couple of reference books available at the bank's library and prepared my one page brief before long and sent him. Next day after his meeting was over, he called me returned my manuscript with thanks and commented 'you hardly left any blank space on the sheet to put in as much information as you could - that was a trick to make brevity a bit embellished'.
But another Chairman of the Bank had difficulty in dealing with aid-memoirs for his meeting with the Reserve Bank of India. He demand for various data tabulated in all sorts of permutation and combinations and had extensive briefing sessions with his deputies, chief economist and statisticians. Once he remarked after returning from RBI Credit Policy meeting " You people give me so much of information that I could hardly use any of them. But the State Bank of India Chairman did not carry any paper with him and yet reeled of information as if they were in his finger tips'. A remarkable observation on a qualities of the chief of the largest bank in India! Freeing oneself from the jungle of details to key macro-indicators and from numbers to orders of magnitudes is what managers need to learn as they travel towards the top.
Fortunately, I had opportunity work with both categories in the United Bank of India. Since the first set of exposures in this area were with the first category of independent and articulate top bankers, it was easy to get a hang of their preferences and strong views. United Bank of India Chairman B K Dutta used to dictate his articles / speeches himself. Once I had edited his first draft but he was extremely disappointed and angry about my :removing the words 'ludicurous' and 'ridiculous' as adjective to certain actions/ ideas of certain sections of the society: he was very particular about which words expressed his thoughts adequately. Once after reading the copy of one of the issues of the journal of the National Institute of Bank Management, he sent it to us with an attached slip with his note: 'This is not only a wastage of national resources but a drag on clear thinking'. I had thought then that the nature of topics covered in the journal and the highly mathematical content of the articles in that issue had failed to meet the expectations he had on the Bank Management Institute.
Mr. Dutta was a member of the State Planning Board of West Bengal. One late afternoon he called me and gave my a 300+page-document prepared by the Board. It was the State's plan approach paper setting out the priorities and major development programmes. He asked to give him a short brief next morning as he had to attend the Planning Board's meeting later in the afternoon that day. I went home, worked for three-hours the same evening and prepared a 10-page executive summary of the document in my own handwriting and gave him the manuscript. He glanced at that and told his secretary to get it typed. Next day morning, he called me to give back these documents and appreciated my effort in quickly producing an useful executive summary.
Mr. PK Sen, the deputy General Manager of the Bank, was the third senior most top official of the Bank, after the Chairman and the General Manager (those days deputy general managers and general managers were very few in banks unlike today when you have hundreds of them: deputy general managers in those days were roughly equivalent to deputy managing directors or executive directors of nationalised banks today). He always spoke extempore and seldom signed an article. He was a good speaker. But he would discuss on varying subjects whenever there was any chance: once he discussed with me about inflation and in the course of discussion asked how I had been adjusting my family expenditure in the face of high inflation in the early 1970s after the first oil shock. I told him that I was trying to shift to lower priced substitutes wherever possible like shifting from milk-based butter to soya-based margarine. He sarcastically commented that the soyabean product was not at all tasty to go with the breakfast toast. On another occasion he called me and asked me to give hum on just one side of a single sheet of paper all relevant information on a small European country's economy to help him prepare for a meeting he had on the next day with a trade minister of that country. He emphasised that my brief should on a single quarto-size paper and I need not write long sentences. I asked for a favour: I would write the brief on one side of a quarto-size paper but would not get it typed as this would leave lot of space blank because of margins on both sides and between the lines. He agreed. I picked up a couple of reference books available at the bank's library and prepared my one page brief before long and sent him. Next day after his meeting was over, he called me returned my manuscript with thanks and commented 'you hardly left any blank space on the sheet to put in as much information as you could - that was a trick to make brevity a bit embellished'.
But another Chairman of the Bank had difficulty in dealing with aid-memoirs for his meeting with the Reserve Bank of India. He demand for various data tabulated in all sorts of permutation and combinations and had extensive briefing sessions with his deputies, chief economist and statisticians. Once he remarked after returning from RBI Credit Policy meeting " You people give me so much of information that I could hardly use any of them. But the State Bank of India Chairman did not carry any paper with him and yet reeled of information as if they were in his finger tips'. A remarkable observation on a qualities of the chief of the largest bank in India! Freeing oneself from the jungle of details to key macro-indicators and from numbers to orders of magnitudes is what managers need to learn as they travel towards the top.
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