Character and potential assessment is a capability severely deficient in the sawdust caesars strutting the stage of Indian industry. Despite all their claims to professionalism, the great majority of promotions and fancy designations in India Inc continue to be awarded on considerations of nepotism, kinship, connections and sycophancy. In a society where top political appointments are made on similar considerations, this is perhaps inevitable. But the price of nepotism paid by companies™ shareholders and society is heavy. A narrative ” of which your editor has first-hand personal experience ” illustrating the validity of this observation is provided by the amazing history of the late Alok Jagdish Saxena, the promoter-chairman of Mumbai-based Elder Pharmaceuticals Ltd who passed on in October last year. Way back in the 1970s when your editor was a junior executive in Rallis India Ltd, Saxena was parachuted into the company™s middle management following the merger of Tata Fisons Ltd, a UK-based pesticides and pharmaceuticals company with Rallis in 1972. But although a competent executive, Saxena was given no room to ideate or innovate by the Tata Fison division general manager, Dr. S. Agarwala, a clueless medical practitioner, who by a mysterious alchemy was promoted to the position of director of the pharma division of Rallis India. Frustrated, Saxena put in his papers, and against all expert advice promoted Elder Pharmaceuticals in 1989. Under his stewardship the company prospered mightily to record a sales turnover of Rs.1,650 crore in 2012-13. And recently Elder Pharma was acquired by Torrent Pharma for a humungous Rs.2,004 crore. Nor is this the only instance of Agarwala™s poor judgement. According to him your correspondent was unqualified to write the product brochures of the company and was demoted, triggering another resignation. Within a year I established Business India as the country™s most widely read finance and commerce magazine which arguably catalysed the process of liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy. But for each such story that ended well, there must be thousands of lives destroyed by the cardboard cut-outs of India Inc, lions of domestic industry but bleating lost lambs in the newly emergent global marketplace. Intellectual leap requirement Despite the astonishing success of the Aam Admi (˜common man™) Party in the Delhi state assembly election being intimately connected with localised civic issues ” electricity, water supply, municipal corruption, ration cards etc ” in other parts of the country these civic issues which impact the daily lives of citizens, receive scant attention. This is certainly true of the once spic-n-span garden city of Bangalore. Today, this charming city once renowned for its well-maintained lakes and green parks is choked with road traffic and domestic and industrial waste at every street corner, the outcome of slapdash development planning by Karnataka™s notoriously corrupt establishment and somnambulant Planning Commission, who have miserably failed to develop counter-magnet cities in Karnataka (pop. 62 million). As a result Bangalore™s population has spiralled from 1 million in 1960 to almost 9 million. Despite its flourishing hi-tech IT industry, the municipal…
