This Book is not an autobiography, though it appears to read so. It is the history of HMT Limited (which was Hindustan Machine Tools Limited before) for over a quarter of a century since its inception in 1953 till 1978. Right through this period of 25 years, I worked in the Company and held various executive positions. Making a beginning as Works Superintendent in 1953, I retired as Chairman & Managing Director of the Company in 1978. Evenso, for the sake of good or-der, I have briefly dealt with the period prior to my joining HMT, particularly because of some strange incidents, which forced me to leave my previous job with Walchands and join HMT. The Book being essentially the story of HMT in its initial period, the story would certainly go beyond my 25 years with the Company. It is a book which describes how an enterprise in public sector could succeed and in fact, set example as an efficient, profitable and progressive enterprise in the public sector.
The book is our acknowledgement of debt of gratitude we owe to those who have been the pillars of strength and encouragement for us to achieve the progressive development of the Company. I sincerely pay my tribute to the founder, late Shri S.S. Iyengar, Special Officer, Machine Tool Industry in the then Ministry of Industry & Supply, who prepared the Project Report in 1950s and served as the first General Technical Manager of the Company till 1956. We record our special acknowledgements to late Shri M.K. Mathulla, who really laid the foundation for the Company during his 8 years of service for 1956 to 1964 as the Chairman and Managing Director of HMT. We were singularly fortunate in having to work under kind and helpful Ministers and a co-operative bureaucracy.
Personally, I am immensely obliged to my colleagues and the employees of HMT but for whose whole hearted co-operation, dedicated and hard work, it would not have been possible to build this premier enterprise, crowned as the 'Jewel in the Public Sector' by late Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and eulogised as 'Magnum Opus' by Shri Manubhai Shah, then Minister of State in the Ministry of Industry.
It is hoped that the book will serve as a 'Case Study' of a successful corporation for students of management science.
Way back in the sixties, when we were involved in the academic pursuits, the mention of the name Dr. S.M. Patil conjured up an image of a professional with indomitable will and a moving spirit, in the relentless pursuit of laying foundation for free India's industrial edifice.
Subsequently, I was fortunate to have made a career in the monolith institution that he nurtured and cherished even to this day. I would regard HMT being lucky to have emerged under his stewardship but for which it would not have been what it is today.
As the polemics of the Nehruvian socialist doctrine for the industrialisation of India through Public Enterprises rages on, it is pertinent to delve into the petulant realities that the nation faced soon after independence, which perhaps pre-empted pursuit of any other model for industrial development. Since then, there have been many course corrections and the Indian industry having undergone paradigm shifts is now a force to reckon with. In this backdrop it is pertinent to understand the evolution of an engineering conglomerate to effectively catapult the nation through technical prowess to the future.
I am glad that, Dr. Patil in his book has vividly recapitulated the emergence on one of India's premier Public Enterprises. I am sure that the book would serve as a beacon to practicing managers to understand in right perspective the travails and tribulations that marks establishment of an industrial enterprise especially, at a time when the entire country was more or less in its infancy in terms of technical and engineering capability.
Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru called them "temples of modern India". He had dreamt that, in due course of time, the Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs) would rise up to "commanding heights of the Indian economy". However, during the past couple of years the PSEs have encountered not only serious problems to achieve the "commanding heights" visualised for them, but their very existence, is threatened.
With the current economic policies of the Government of India of liberalisation and globalisation, the Indian Industry in general and the PSEs in particular, are having to play a second fiddle to the multi-national companies, which are entering the Indian industrial scene with their rich resources, high technology, enormous market strengths and strong research and development base. PSEs like the Indian Telephone Industry, Bharat Electronics, HMT (Hindustan Machine Tools) and even BHEL have lost their glamour. Without much of Government's support, and protection, they are struggling to survive in the market, against competition from the giant foreign companies. Inspite of these adverse conditions, I am sure, some of them could survive and face the challenge successfully. But this is possible only, if, over the years, they have taken sufficient care and adequate measures to generate inner strengths and vitality to build a well-knit organisation. How much of these essential inputs have been developed during the initial period of 25 years of HMT, is primarily the theme of the book. There is considerable amount of literature available on the subject of "Management of Public Sector Enterprises". However, there is hardly any book on the subject, written by a Chief Executive giving his life experiences in managing a large public sector undertaking successfully and more importantly, building the basic strengths. I have hence attempted to put my own experiences of doing so in HMT, in the form of this book.
For me, it has been a long and strenuous journey of more than 25 years in HMT, since its inception in 1953. The areas covered by me in HMT have been practically the entire gamut of management aspects of industry, spanning from workshop management to marketing of products, both capital goods like machine tools and consumer durables like tractors and watches. The narration as expected, is in the form of personal memoirs or part autobiography of my experiences, events and encounters in HMT. I also could not have avoided mentioning, though briefly, the incidents in my personal life as far as these were relevant to the subject. This, notwithstanding, I have tried to convey to the readers the basics of management practices in industry, which largely contribute to the success of any corporate Company. Furthermore, to make the description of these basic principles of management more interesting to read, I have used more personal and informal language, unlike the one familiar to all of us which is couched in creches and management jargons. This is a story of a large organisation like HMT and goes beyond the life of an individual, like me.
It is a common public perception that Government enterprises cannot function as efficiently as their private sector counterparts. This is true in many ways. Being inflexible with bureaucratic conceptions and methods of administration, with little autonomy of operation, these enterprises are continuously faced with conflicting interests between the Company on the one hand and the Government on the other. With undue bureaucratic and political interference, the public sector undertakings are unable to match the performance of private Companies.
Against this unfavourable situation with the State-owned enterprises, it is a matter of satisfaction for me, that HMT stood among the few PSEs and proved that if the affairs of the company were to be conducted in a business-like manner, as in the case of the private sector companies, it should be possible to face competition from the private sector including multi-nationals. It was indeed the philosophy of HMT that any product-line that we entered into, we should become the market leader. Undoubtedly, HMT faced the ups and downs in the changing market conditions, from time to time. But by adopting suitable and innovative measures like programme of diversification, we got over these problems successfully. For instance, we diversified within the family of machine tools by taking up the production of more and more sophisticated machines, and other engineering items, outside machine tools, like watches, tractors, printing machinery etc.
HMT gave highest priority to training and development of personnel at every level. Our Organisational Development (OD) programmes for training management and supervisory personnel were unique and pioneering. However, basic to all these efforts in developing human resources, was the building-up of a strong and homogeneous team of managers and most importantly, the corporate culture. In fact, the message which comes out bold and clear, is that all modern organisation and management techniques could go nought in the absence of a healthy corporate culture and the development of a core of a dedicated team of managers with a mission to build large organisations.
Yet one more important point which emerges from the Book, though not directly, is the growth of the Indian Machine Tool Indus-try over the years, after Independence. How HMT performed it's role not merely to become the market leaders themselves, but how the Company was instrumental in modernising and updating the country's machine tool industry, as a whole, is very significant. It is a matter of history that but for HMT, India would not probably have had the envious position among the developing countries to boast of modern, virile, versatile and highly qualitative machine tool production facilities in the country. Another area pioneered by HMT is the export of machine tools. Sure, some machine tools had been exported before, but most of them were of older designs, shoddy and cheap. In fact, these drawbacks came in the way of our export efforts. The reader could observe that practically almost all my foreign visits in-variably included export business as one of the important items. The struggle we had to make during the early years for exporting our machine tools to advanced countries has been brought out in a detailed manner.
A Significant factor which emerges from the Book, is the failure of our attempts to float financial joint-ventures in manufacturing machines which we considered as technologically difficult ‘and highly advanced, but eventually needed by the country. Besides, we tried this exercise to produce products outside machine tools like the "small car" and printing machinery, Heavy Duty Pressers etc. We had an idea to set up our manufacturing and assembly facilities abroad. For instance, we moved our export operations from Frankfurt to Luxembourg where we saw a possibility of setting up a small workshop in association with a foreign partner. We tried to set up an operation in Iran with a local partner for building standard range of our machine tools; but all our efforts, could not succeed. In an international collaboration with Japan, the U.S.A and U.K., we tried to build the latest types of CNC machining Centres for marketing all over the world on production-sharing basis. Though we succeeded partially in this endeavour with a U.K. firm, we could not make any headway with the other partners, who thought that the experiment could only succeed through a joint financial venture.
The conditions then prevailing for joint-ventures were not favourable. The Government policies did not favour any outflow of foreign exchange which is essential in a partnership of this kind. Under the present open economy however our industry has taken advantage of the prevailing conditions and is attempting to enter into strategic alliances with world well-known companies for updating their designs and manufacturing technologies to international standards so as to become competitive in the domestic and the world markets. Our Automobile Industry has already progressed substantially in this direction.
**Sample Pages**
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