| Newsmaker: Tarun Das | |
| Liberalisation's chief mentor | | A K Bhattacharya / New Delhi November 6, 2009, 0:21 IST | |
CII’s former director general transformed a small engineering industry association into an authoritative lobby for economic reform.
 Tarun Das, who stepped down as chief mentor of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) early this week, is likely to go down in history as a man who built an institution. That is a rare achievement in a country, where institutions are prone to fade away after becoming a plaything in the hands of powerful, self-serving personalities.
It all began almost 35 years ago, when Das, then in his thirties, engineered a rather unusual merger of two rival associations with completely different work cultures. Both the organisations were headquartered in Calcutta (as it was known then), but one of them represented big engineering companies including British firms and the other took up the cudgels for small and medium engineering companies mostly owned and promoted by Indians.
That, however, did not deter Das, who had returned from England a few years earlier with a degree from Manchester University and a job at the Bengal Chamber of Commerce. In April 1974, a new organisation was born — the Association of Indian Engineering Industry (AIEI) and Das headed its secretariat.
One of the first decisions Das took as the head of AIEI was to shift the headquarters to New Delhi. Behind that decision was his dream to make AIEI the country’s most influential industry association. Das had reckoned that his dream would remain unfulfilled if he remained headquartered in Calcutta.
New Delhi in the mid-1970s was in a political turmoil. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had imposed an internal Emergency in a bid to quell domestic political unrest. Her economic policies had already enmeshed the country in a web of licensing controls, protective tariffs and high taxes. The economic policy landscape during the 1970s was ripe for reforms, but the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) and the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham), which ruled the world of industry associations at the time, did not believe in pressing for those changes. If the two large chambers sought policy changes at all, they did so by successfully lobbying with powerful politicians and ministers to address specific grievances of sections of industry. Reforms of policy per se to make it transparent and open were yet to appear on their agenda.
Das quickly saw a void in the way the country’s leading industry chambers had framed their terms of engagement with the government. He realised that AIEI was a small association representing only engineering companies, but it could carve for itself a credible position by championing the cause of reforms and non-discretionary economic policies. His allies in this journey were several bureaucrats in different economic ministries, who would later be occupying key secretarial positions during the 1990s when the Indian economy did open up as Das had envisaged, and a small but powerful group of industrialists like Rahul Bajaj, N Kalyani and Jamshyd Godrej.
Das took his own time to come to terms with the hard reality of influencing economic policies through political lobbying. He made few compromises, however, and soon made a mark for himself and his organisation for toeing a line that stood out for its professional approach to issues. It worked closely with the bureaucracy to influence policy changes, while Ficci and Assocham continued to work on the ministers. The new building of AIEI in New Delhi’s institutional area did not get a proper electricity connection for months because Das refused to bribe officials of the power utility concerned.
In 1985, the country had a new prime minister in Rajiv Gandhi. It was an opportunity for Das to take the next step. Key members of AIEI were close to Rajiv Gandhi, while the leadership at Ficci was yet to build its rapport with the young prime minister. Within a year, AIEI rechristened itself the Confederation of Engineering Industry (CEI) to claim its position as the authoritative voice of India’s manufacturing sector.
The following years saw Das building bridges with the ministers in the new government, while deepening his relations with the bureaucracy. Ficci appeared to have been caught in a time warp and Assocham had lost its clout with multinational firms gravitating towards CEI. It took five more years for Das to contemplate another name change — this time from CEI to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which soon became the leading industry body and almost simultaneously the strongest proponent of economic reforms. Das had achieved his goal he had set for himself in 1974.
Another area of focus for Das was the international network he built for CII. Working closely with the government and industry, he set up representative offices in different countries as and when there was a business opportunity. One of the most durable relationships he struck for CII was the arrangement with the World Economic Forum to hold an annual economic summit in New Delhi, an event that celebrates its silver jubilee this year. Today, apart from its 64 offices in the country, CII has nine overseas offices and institutional partnerships with 213 counterpart organisations in 88 countries.
While that is a clear evidence of institution building (Das had stepped down as its director general in 2004 and assumed the role of the chief mentor for the following five years to facilitate the transition), Das has often shown a streak of adventurism that sets him apart among his contemporaries. His lobbying for protection to the capital goods sector in the face of rising imports or his attack on foreign companies entering the Indian market as partners in joint ventures (he called them cowboys) came as a surprise.
Das, however, would justify those outbursts as his way of taking up the cudgels for what is good for Indian industry, just as he would defend his discreet role as one of the mediators to resolve the dispute between Suzuki of Japan and the Indian government over the management of Maruti Udyog in the mid-1990s. Similarly, his critics described his extension of his tenure as director general as a sign of his failure to build a second rung of leadership and plan succession, a charge that he denies.
In the last five years as CII’s chief mentor, Das took on new responsibilities. He was involved with the West Bengal government in various capacities to help it attract industrial investments to the state. He became the non-executive chairman of the cement major, ACC. Early this year, the government appointed him a member of the board of the scandal-hit Satyam Computers with the task of stabilising the company’s operations and finding it a buyer.
Only the naive will believe that after stepping down as CII’s chief mentor Das will fade into a retired life. His eyes are clearly set on expanding the international network of Indian industry. Who knows, the 70-year old Das, the most enduring voice of Indian industry over the last three decades, has already set for himself a new goal.
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