Civil police
Companies are using the man-next-door to police their services
| The paan vendor is a Reliance Mitra (friend of Reliance), one of the 49,000 common folk across the country who swear allegiance to the company. The tribe of Reliance Mitras include roadside mechanics, farmers, hawkers and anybody who operates his business besides the 75,000-km stretch of the mammoth Reliance fibre-optic network. |
| If the face-in-the-crowd stands up for Reliance, then 350-odd senior citizens in Mumbai have been looking forward to their daily walks since the Mumbai-based compressed natural gas (CNG) company, Mahanagar Gas Limited, wove a bit of adventure into an otherwise mundane health routine a year back. In the course of their 1.5-km walks, twice a day, these senior citizens watch out for any road being dug in their locality. |
| They are representatives of Dignity Foundation, a non-governmental organisation that looks after the welfare of senior citizens. Any person found digging the tarmac is stopped. |
| The reason: the gas pipes of Mahanagar Gas, which supplies piped cooking gas to Mumbai households, could be passing beneath the spot that's being dug. |
| The common point between Reliance Infocomm and Mahanagar Gas is more than just using service of individuals who have ample time on their hands. Both companies belong to the Indian utility sector, where unauthorised digging of roads is a perennial problem. |
| As A K Purwaha, managing director, Mahanagar Gas, points out, "The workers involved in the digging are not literate enough to understand the consequence of unchecked digging." |
| Also, the utility corridor is limited in most places. In a city like Mumbai, it would not be unusual to find power and telephone cables, water pipelines and even drainage lines running along the same stretch of land. |
| As a result, one utility service provider tripping the other's line because of a mis-hit from the crowbar (or electronic drill) is more than a stray instance. |
| Mahanagar Gas, for instance, has paid the price for adventurous digging by other utility service providers. In March 2003, a street in Mumbai suburb Andheri went up in flames after the gas pipeline running beneath the road caught fire after the road was dug up by a telecom company to lay cables. |
| Mahanagar Gas "" which has 600 km of polyethylene pipes and 160 km of high pressure steel pipelines installed across Mumbai city "" couldn't afford to put the incident down to experience. |
| Within six months, the Dignitarians were supervising the pipelines closer to home "" since it is easier to keep track of the pipeline layouts in your own locality than anywhere else. |
| The presence of senior citizens also works on a softer aspect. Workers are likely to listen better to an older individual, rather than stop work on the say-so of a gas company official on a motorbike. This is one reason why Mahanagar Gas prefers to use its 40-odd motorbike-riding personnel during the night, when traffic is less heavy. |
| "In heavy traffic you lose concentration of surveillance," says Purwaha. Apart from supervising the roads, the Dignitarians also help the company with other activities like meter reading and bill distribution. |
| This is not the first time that Mahanagar Gas has tied up with Dignity. It first used the services of Dignity volunteers in 2001 at petrol pumps to check taxis fitted with CNG cylinders, after a spurious cylinder fitted in a taxi exploded at a Mumbai gas station. |
| Over a period of eight months, Dignitarians conducted round-the-clock patrols at petrol pumps selling CNG and disallowed refuelling of cylinders that were spurious, rusty or old. They also certified cylinders that passed quality standards. |
| While safety and loss prevention was first on the agenda for Mahanagar Gas, it was the scope of manning a humongous 75,000-km network without adding to costs that was a priority for Reliance. |
| In 2001, when the company estimated manpower requirements to guard the network, it found that an additional 45,000 security personnel would be required (one guard for every 1.5-km stretch). |
| With a minimum salary of Rs 5,000 a month for every guard, this would mean that the company spent nearly Rs 270 crore every year. "This would increase costs and work against the dream of servicing the customer for 40 paise a call," says H S Pannu, director and COO, Reliance Group Security Services. |
| Hence the company looked at the possibility of engaging a network of informers who were willing to help the company. "The idea was to have three or four people every kilometre," says Pannu. |
| The responsibility for spotting potential Mitras was given to the 13 circle security managers; the only criterion was that the Mitra "should have some reason to be near a Reliance asset". These Mitras were then given a certificate by the company. By end July 2004, there were 49,000 Reliance Mitras. |
| But just appointing the Reliance Mitras was not enough. As Pannu points out, "Unless you monitor the system it will not succeed." Hence Reliance developed a weekly audit system which is now ISO certified. The audit system features all the information that's received from the informers every week and distills it into how many were useful and so on. The Mitras are rewarded based on the usefulness of the information. |
| For instance, between July 2003 and June 2004, Mitras passed on 10,903 messages to the company about a threat to the network. Of this, nearly 8,342 messages (about 80 per cent) were found useful by the company. Rs 300 is paid for each useful information that helps prevent damage to the network. That's a pittance compared to what a company would pay to repair a fibre cut "" upward of Rs 25,000 for a single cut. |
| In the case of the Mahanagar Gas pipeline burst in Andheri, the company spent close to Rs 2 lakh in repair while the value of the leaked gas is difficult to ascertain. |
| "After the senior citizen patrol initiative, accidents have come down drastically," claims V S Murali, general manager, Mahanagar Gas. He adds that third party damages to the pipeline has come down by 50 per cent in the one year that the initiative has been in existence. |
| This trend looks like it may catch on. Even in sectors like financial services, the Dignity Foundation claims to have provided volunteers to a couple of banks for supervising housekeeping at ATMs on a short-term basis. For the 350-odd Dignitarians in Mumbai, health may not exactly be translating into wealth, but it fetches a pocket money of Rs 500 per month. And a morning walk is fast becoming serious business. |