Amidst People Missing Powers & Status: My Unfolding Voyage 079

One of the tasks at Coal India was to attend external training programs and workshops and seminars as a delegate from Coal India: they needed someone with no link to emergency work available to represent Coal India in these programs and workshops. Some of the interesting programs that I had attended during my five year stint at Coal India included a workshop on Managing Restructuring of Sick Units organized by Indian Institute of Management Calcata, a workshop on Systems Management by some professors of IIM Bangalore, and a seminar on National Incomes Policy in Delhi, a course in Cost Benefit Analysis by a Calcutta-based Research Institute and a seminar organized by the US Information Service, Kolkata in collaboration with the Tata Training centre at Jamshedpur. In Delhi, I found a short, bearded and quiet gentleman, an IAS officer of West Bengal cadre, attending the three day seminar on Incomes Policy: he was although out keeping quiet and did not appear to be interested in participating in discussions. A few years later, I found him in Coal India in charge of Personnel Department. I could not fathom what this gentleman was doing but later I found him heading a Govt. of India enterprise in West Bengal. Some IAS officers seem to enjoy doing nothing except managing to get into positions that demands very little but earns you better compensation.
In the course on Cost Benefit Analysis, I found my former economic teacher at the undergraduate college giving us a series of lectures: by that time I had already earned my Phd with a thesis on social cost benefit analysis. I had asked him a question at that time and is yet to find a satisfactory reply: my question was: ‘if a project was set up based on shadow price-based viability while the project was down right commercially unviable based on market price based economics, how would the company with such a project survive?’ I myself had later given lectures to bankers on social cost benefit analysis: my plea was that in a controlled economic regime of India then (prior to 1991), bankers must first reject those that did not have an internal rate of return higher than the cost of capital on a market price economic calculus as well as based on shadow price calculus and then accord priority to those among the projects found commercially viable on market price calculus that have with higher positive social rate of return net of social cost of capital. My guideline may not be strictly in accordance with welfare economics but may help protect the banks’ interest of getting their loans back while being socially responsible in financing. Economic practice is sometimes a confused art in planned, government controlled economies.

Towards the end of a session in the evening a professor of IIM Bangalore gave us a problem and asked to come up with the solution next morning. A person traveled along a straight road for twelve hours between 7AM to 7PM from point X to Y at varying unknown speeds and he returned back the next day starting from Y at 7AM and reaching X at 7 PM trotting at unknown variable speeds. Could there be a point W where he would have been at the same time of the clock on both the days? I thought over the problem during my sleep at night and came to conclusion that this problem could be solved through the Bower’s fixed point theorem in Mathematics. But when we met in the class next morning I said the answer to the question was yes. He asked me to prove. It struck me then what was so simple: imagine the person’s twin brother traveling from Y to X on the same road at varying unknown speed on the same day during the same twelve hours period. Of course, the twins will meet at some point W on the road at some point of time. The whole class got the idea as to how academicians make simple things look complex and fool the business executives.
One of the tasks of the Corporate Planning Department was to coordinate management studies assigned by the company to external consultants. The interactions with the consultants provided an insight into how the company’s management at different levels functioned. Some assignments were carried out by Administrative Staff College of India, which I would happen to visit after I had left Coal India.

Another source of learning was the interaction with a few young management trainees at Coal India headquarters. All of them were in the marketing department and appeared to be inadequately utilized except for brain storming sessions. Two of them would go back to the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta as Research fellow to obtain PhD degrees. One would (Raghunathan) later become a Professor of Finance Indian Institiute of Management Ahmedabad while the other (Sudip Chatterjee) would return to Coal India at a senior position. Another trainee would shift to a private sector firm headquartered in Mumbai (Devadasann). Two others (Roy and G) continue in Coal India. I had chance meeting with Devdasan and Chatterjee later in life.
Ms. Anjali Sen, the Public Relations Officer, was an interesting person and would often interact with me regarding press communications and in-house magazine. This sophisticated elderly lady would call me over inter-com to announce that Mrs Sen was on the line and once I could not resist the temptation to say that Mr. Sen was responding.
Sulav Mukerjee, the Statistician was the closes friend I had in Coal India. We were in the same age group and visited each others residence with family. His boss RN Sinha would sometimes spend time with me: he would never hide the importance he enjoyed as the Chief Information Officer of the company. His bosses, both mining engineers, Mr. Chatterjee and Mr. Balachandran were intelligent persons but did not seem to be busy beyond monitoring the daily/ monthly coal production and dispatches. The six/ seven mining engineers in the Proudction Department at Coal India headquarters were a great source of learning some basics of the mining operations life. All these officials seem to be busy but I found them completely relaxed: they seem to be fish out of the water of mining life. The engineers (mostly electrical/ mechanical) in the Engineering Department were monitoring the performance of heavy equipments at the hundreds of coal mines. Interaction with them suggested that they were also relaxed and had time to explain to me the issues of productivity and idling of costly mining machinery. Most of the engineers seemed to be missing real operational activities and reluctantly adapting to corporate staff function requiring continuous updating of technology knowledge and interpreting MIS data. The power and status enjoyed by an engineer of any rank seemed to decline as the distance from the mining activity location increases.

With the departure of Chairman Lt. General Grewal, the corporate planning activities lost much of their glamour. But we could do virtually whatever we like in undertaking studies and connecting ideas. My boss being a mining engineer, the Chief of Corporate Planning virtually worked as another of Chairman’s technical adviser cum executive assistant, while I worked with the help of two junior officers, Kalyan Sen and Dulal Goswami. My colleagues were very affectionate and co-operative. My secretary, Mr. Sensarma, a very reserved kind of person with hardly any intimacy with office colleagues, had an initial trouble with his perception of his work being that of taking dictations and typing them out rather than also typing out large statistical / analytical tabular statement with numbers, became a very helpful and affectionate. He had given up his initial resistance as soon as I started dictating from manually prepared statistical tables for him to convert into stenographic notes for typing on typewriters: he would always deliver his output in the quickest possible time and virtually without errors.