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| Lunch with BS: R C Bhargava | | Ill begun, well done |
| Suveen K Sinha / New Delhi Dec 23, 2008, 00:46 IST |
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 With Maruti turning 25, its chairman, who was there when it all began, drives down memory lane.
Sometime in 1983, R C Bhargava faced an existential question. Should he go back to the elite Indian Administrative Service, which he had joined in 1956 but had been away from for over four years? He had spent two years on deputation with state-owned Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (Bhel), and moved to Maruti Udyog Ltd in the summer of 1981 as its third employee after V Krishnamurthy, the first managing director and vice-chairman, and one D S Gupta. All three were together at Bhel.
Two things kept Bhargava back in Maruti, writes Suveen K Sinha. First, he would have retired from IAS in a short few years with a princely pension of Rs 3,500 or so. Already, his children’s education was being supported by his wife’s income. Secondly, Maruti Udyog was the pet project of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, as it was taking forward her late son Sanjay’s dream project. If the exit of one of the company’s founders displeased her, Bhargava’s career prospects could have been undermined.
“There was a lot of stuff written in those days about Maruti. I had to be in Parliament nearly every day, passing information on little slips of paper to help the government answer questions,” recalls Bhargava as he — tall, lean and fit at 74 — stretches with feline grace on the corner sofa in the main bar area of Delhi Golf Club. He is sipping on lime soda and I on a glass of Coke (or, is it Pepsi?). From the window behind him, I can see food counters and a melee of men, women and children chattering on tables laid out in the brilliant sunshine as the Delhi winter continues to be benign. Bhargava looks away in the distance as he recounts the early days as if they were scenes flickering on a screen before him, which he alone can see.
Many saw Maruti Udyog Ltd, which was incorporated in February 1981 and which acquired the assets of Sanjay’s Maruti Ltd, including 298 acres in Gurgaon, for less than Rs 5 crore, as a ploy by the prime minister to recover some of the money lost by her son. As it turned out, Gandhi’s family got nothing from the liquidation process as there was nothing left for the equity holders after settling priority claims.
Everyone thought Maruti was doomed to fail. The government, on the basis of the assessment by Gandhi family representative Arun Nehru, had laid down the condition that the company must sell at least 100,000 a year. That was seen to be the viability threshold. And the company had to get its cars on the road before the end of 1983. The car market in the previous decade had been 35,000-40,000 a year. At the first board meeting, non-executive chairman S Mulgaokar, who was the chairman of Tata Motors, said the company should be making trucks and not cars. He resigned when the company decided to go ahead and make cars.
This was already 1981 and there was not a collaborator in the negotiating room. It was anyway going to be difficult to find one because the collaborator had to bring in 40 per cent of the equity and buy 50 per cent of the production — conditions that were later softened. The government had started a search for a product and collaborator even before Maruti Udyog was established. European car makers Renault and Volkswagen were briefly in the fray, before Renault’s car, an 1,800cc Sedan, was found to be unsuitable and VW, whose chairman was about to retire and did not want to bet on India, dropped out. The search began all over again and an accidental discovery of the fledgling car project by O Suzuki made his company the government’s partner in October 1982.
Suzuki not only brought its cars to India but also its work culture. India hadn’t seen anything like it. “One of the things Mr Krishnamurthy told Mr Suzuki was that we would like them to help us establish car manufacturing which would give us the same quality as Suzuki, and the same low-cost production. Mr Suzuki put the condition that we will have to follow him and listen to his advice in all matters,” recalls Bhargava with a chuckle.
The difference between the salary of a worker and the president of a company in Japan is the narrowest in the world, narrower than in a communist country. This was implemented in Maruti. The management set an example in coming on time to work, in the number of hours they worked, and kept its lunch and coffee breaks short. The office was open and everyone wore the uniform. In the company’s first office in New Delhi’s Hansalaya building, Bhargava sat in an open hall along with everyone else. Though Suzuki’s reasoning was that it made for better communication, it also made it difficult for anyone to shirk work. Everyone ate in the same canteen, which was an Indian innovation since in Japan the directors had a separate dining area. All this created the feeling that everyone was in it together.
Didn’t Bhargava, the IAS, mind losing his exclusivity? “I was never enamoured of the paraphernalia of status. My father was in the Forest Research Institute (FRI) in Dehradun. We were a normal, large, middle-class family. After joining the service, it was clear that while you commanded so-called respect in office, that respect was only for the chair and not for you. I saw that once people retired, or left office, all the guys saying they were the greatest quickly forgot the officer. I did not see a point in getting used to transient things.”
Soon, he demonstrates this as we step out in the open for lunch. With Bhargava deciding to go with my selection of grilled pomphret on the continental counter, we wait to collect our food slips, and then wait some more at the counter to be served. A few minutes later, plates in hand, we go around looking before we find an empty table. The chat continues as Bhargava looks as comfortable in the rickety chair as he did on the sofa inside.
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