by Mark Tully
It would seem that in many ways Gandhi was his own worst enemy. I once described him as ‘too good a man’. He was such an extreme ascetic that many must be tempted to say they can’t live like him and therefore he has no relevance to their lives. Although a devout Hindu, he was not one to take the middle road when he expressed his ideas, which has made it all too easy for the establishment and the press, hell-bent on promoting their own concept of growth as the panacea to all society’s ills, to ridicule him and his beliefs as romantic and unrealistic.
So, what if we were to peel away the crust in which the Gandhians have encased their hero, to try to understand the symbolism of Gandhi’s language instead of taking him literally? What is he saying about our needs? In his own words, ‘Renunciation does not mean that if one has wealth it should be thrown away and wife and children should be turned out of doors. It simply means that one must give up attachment to these things.’
Yet the principle of non-attachment has a limited appeal in a world that is steered predominantly by Western values. As the Western nations are among the richest, they also appear to be the most successful, so it’s not surprising that the elite in a country such as India should be tempted to follow their lead. And there is no sign that most Westerners want anything to do with the ideas propounded by Gandhi. Instead, Western businessmen continue to extol the virtues of consumerism and to demand the right to spread its principles as a condition for investing in developing countries. Western politicians preach the virtues of a way of life they regard as freedom. The Western media disseminates the attractions of an energy-guzzling way of life. In its messages there is no suggestion that the West needs to do some major rethinking.
If the West won’t listen to the Mahatma, perhaps it will listen to another man greatly admired there, the Dalai Lama. In his Ethics for the New Millennium the Dalai Lama says:
Although I never imagined that material wealth alone could overcome suffering, still, looking towards the developed world from Tibet, a country then as now very poor in this respect, I must admit I thought it must go further towards doing so than is the case … The extraordinary achievements of science and technology have advanced little more than linear, numerical improvement … progress has meant hardly more than greater numbers of opulent houses in more cities with more cars driving between them. Certainly there has been a reduction in some types of suffering, including certain illnesses. But there has been no overall reduction.’
But the dominant Western ‘science’, economics, does not take account of suffering, nor do mainstream business models consider it to be a cost. The only costs they worry about are those which directly affect profits and shareholder value.
DARJEELING: COUNTING COSTS
THE HUFFS AND puffs of the little b-class engine grew longer and longer, her breathing became more and more laboured, and the effort to keep her pistons moving backwards and forwards seemed greater and greater. Black smoke poured out of her funnel and steam hissed from her aged, leaky joints as she crawled up the steepest section of the narrow gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, which climbs to a height of 7,400 feet. Since she was now more than one hundred years old, it was hardly surprising that she found hauling the school train from Kurseong to Darjeeling such strenuous work.
At about six-thirty on a winter’s morning, everyone was well wrapped up, with woollen balaclavas being the preferred protection for heads and ears. Schoolboys dressed in neat uniforms with satchels on their backs jumped on the train as it passed. One fell in his effort to scramble on board, and another was kicked off by a large boy who thought the carriage was already crowded enough.
Squeezed into one corner of a carriage, I remembered the days when I used to jump on and off this train myself on my way to boarding school in Darjeeling. I would boast to my friends, ‘My father owns this railway’, which wasn’t quite true. He was a director of the company, and I still have his tiny golden kukree, which can be used as a brooch or a tie pin. On the back is inscribed ‘DHR Pass No 73 Director’. Now, as we made our way slowly but surely past the Castleton tea garden, with its small bushes clinging to the steep slopes, I thought of the tea garden where my sisters and I used to stay during midterm breaks. I still believe the fragrance of tea leaves being roasted in a tea estate factory is finer than any perfume.
My father was a partner in a firm based in Kolkata, which managed not only the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway but a variety of companies, ranging from coal mines to construction, from insurance to jute manufacturing. The company portfolio also included some tea gardens, and his youngest brother, Grafton, was the manager of one of them. Like all good planters, Grafton held those who worked in the head office in Kolkata in contempt, believing that no one there knew anything about tea, and resenting them whenever they issued instructions to the men on the ground who did. When I came back to India as an adult, I stayed with Grafton. I remember him recalling the occasion when my father, on a visit to the tea garden, asked why a roller was dirty. Grafton replied scornfully, ‘Because it’s just been used!’
On this visit to Darjeeling I was delighted to find that battles between planters and head offices were still being fought, and that recently one head office had suffered such a severe defeat that it had withdrawn from the fray. It wasn’t just because, having spent most of my own working life a long way from head office, I was naturally disposed to support the planters. To my mind, this particular battle provided evidence that modern business methods based on the so-called ‘management science’ taught in various business schools were not infallible.
The business community has run one of the most successful sales campaigns of the last twenty years, persuading most of us that businesspeople have the answer to everything, that their methods can be applied to running anything from biscuit-making to broadcasting, from the civil service to schools. As Colin Hines says in his book Localization: A Global Manifesto, big business leaders and international financiers have become ‘the new masters of the universe’. But I found that the science of management had come unstuck in Darjeeling.
Liptons, one of the biggest names in tea, is a company owned by Hindustan Lever, the Indian subsidiary of the multinational Unilever. It had recently sold all its gardens and was now engaged only in marketing tea, rather than growing it. While in Darjeeling, I asked a planter who had worked for Liptons why this had happened. He asked me not to give his name, explaining, ‘I wouldn’t want to be black-listed by a company as powerful as Liptons. You never know, I might need to sell tea myself one day – planting is a pretty precarious business nowadays.’ Then he continued, ‘The trouble was that they had this standard pattern of management. In theory, all multinational managements are bottom up, but in practice – in Liptons at least – the input from the planters on the ground got blocked before it got to anyone who mattered.’ Management had required planters to achieve quarterly targets set by accountants, although in tea no two quarters were ever alike.
‘Supposing there was a drought,’ the planter said. ‘Then inevitably output was down, but you were still expected to achieve the same bottom line – so you had to cut costs. But then that would affect output in the longer run. That was the heart of the problem: Hindustan Lever’s management system couldn’t cope with an agro-business. They needed quick results, but in our line of business doing everything on a short-term basis means long-term losses. So in the end they cut the losses they had incurred and ran. Liptons’ management system simply couldn’t cope.’
When I sent an e-mail to Hindustan Lever’s head office asking why they had sold their gardens, their explanation was, ‘The sell-off of our plantations businesses was part of our company strategy to focus on the branded packet tea segment.’
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The exalted position now held in society by businessmen and -women is another of the swings from one extreme to the other that I have been writing about in this book. The elite members of the Indian Civil Service and the gentlemen officers of the Indian Army used to refer to my father
and other businessmen like him in Kolkata by the derogatory term ‘box-wallahs’. When I was at university in the late 1950s, the brightest and best wanted to become civil servants, diplomats, doctors or lawyers. Business was not a career option for them. In the India of the sixties, I found that the ambition of most students was to get into the Indian Administrative Service (the equally elitist successor of the Indian Civil Service) or the diplomatic service. But now in India the business schools have become the most sought after post-graduate training institutes and the MBA the postgraduate degree to boast about, particularly if it’s an American one.
Modern business methods require constant assessment to measure performance, no matter how difficult performance might be to define. While this may be a comparatively simple assessment to make when you are manufacturing a clearly defined product, such as a motor car, it’s far less easy when your product is school children, university students or hospital patients. League tables based on exam results, for instance, are now used to judge the efficiency and effectiveness of schools in the UK, as though a good education were limited to exam success alone. Nevertheless, parents have become convinced that this is the valid measurement of a school.
By one of the many strokes of good fortune I have enjoyed in writing this book, I was told of the inaugural address given by Professor Rebecca Boden when she took up her chair at the Business School of the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. Professor Boden is an academic whose basic discipline is political science but who has also worked for the British government as an inspector of taxes, so she has had practical experience of government accounting. In her speech, she talked about the targets, league tables, accounts and performance indicators that dominate public life in Britain today and the damaging effect they can have. To illustrate that this is not an entirely modern problem, she quoted a letter from the Duke of Wellington to the Foreign Office in London written when he was commanding the British Army in central Spain during the wars against Napoleon:
Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests … we have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character wit and spleen of every officer. Each item and each farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions, for which I beg your indulgence.
One of the exceptions was one shilling and nine pence unaccounted for in the petty cash of an infantry battalion. The other was confusion about the number of jars of jam issued to a cavalry regiment during a sand storm. Wellington ended his letter by asking whether it was his job ‘to train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of accountants and copy boys in London or perchance to see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain’.
Many of today’s schoolteachers, doctors and other providers of public services must feel like writing similar letters to their respective ministries. But Rebecca Boden went on to argue that the accounting and assessments they are required to provide are far more damaging than the sort of bureaucracy inflicted on the Duke. She discussed the case of schools and prisons in detail. Speaking of the tests that children now have to undergo and which are used for drawing up school performance league tables, she listed their chief adverse results as the following:
They reduce teaching time.
What is taught reflects only what children need to know for the tests.
Pedagogy becomes moulded to teaching children only to pass the tests.
Tests cause children stress and anxiety.
Teachers are adversely impacted and deskilled.
According to Boden, this causes ‘extreme anxiety amongst some kids – especially girls’.
Assessment is a key aspect of management, and it is my belief that the increasing tendency to try to assess everything arises from the conviction that management is all important. And I am not alone in this belief. In his book Blair’s Britain, Mark D. Chapman claims:
Blair, and perhaps even more importantly Brown, have come to see management not simply as a means to an end but as an end in itself, as something which is the principal function of good and responsible government acting in the best interests of its citizens. Perhaps most crucially good management is like the British weather – it cannot be changed. It lies beyond the scope of the politician and has to be left to the experts.
In other words, politicians in Blair’s Britain appear to have handed over their obligation to take decisions to company directors and management consultants
There is now such faith in the business methods of the private sector that it is widely assumed that the public sector cannot be equally efficient and so everything the government owns should be privatised. It was the former British prime minister Harold Macmillan who first described privatisation as ‘selling the family silver’ and he had a point. Private enterprises don’t buy public sector undertakings unless they are confident they can get a higher return on the money they pay for them than any investment in shares or bonds would produce. This means that, in the longer term, the public will lose on the deal.
It has to be said that where there is competition, privatisation does often increase efficiency and profitability. I was always sceptical about the privatisation of the railways in Britain, but I have to admit that it seems to have made them more competitive and thereby increased the number of passengers taking the train. Whether the engineering and maintenance standards of the private companies are up to those of the old British Rail is more questionable.
When it comes to privatising genuine monopolies, the situation is altogether different. In 1988, British private companies were given exclusive concessions for sanitation and water supply. They were guaranteed there would be no competition. The concessions were sold at knock-down prices and on such generous terms that even the Daily Mail newspaper, that most ardent supporter of Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative government, called the privatisation the greatest act of licensed robbery in British history. Since then, the price of water has soared and many of the assets of the companies have deteriorated.
In 2006, the pipes of Thames Water, the largest supplier, were leaking enough water to fill 344 Olympic-size swimming pools every day, and this at a time when Britain was facing the threat of a drought. But while the leaks got worse, the financial return got better, with the company announcing a thirty-one per cent increase in profits. Not surprisingly with profits like that to be made, many of the original companies have been swallowed up by multinationals, and now Britain’s most essential asset – water – is owned by French, German and American companies. All this is the result of blind faith in the private sector and its business methods.
The wastage of Britain’s water is also the result of the narrow calculations that business uses to make its decisions. A spokesman for Ofwat, the British water regulatory body, which is meant to act as a watchdog to protect the public’s interest, was asked why this wastage was being tolerated. He explained that it would cost too much to plug the leaks. Since business culture believes that the only way to people’s hearts is through their purses, he went on to say, ‘This is the way the bills will be cheapest for the consumer.’ He didn’t say that cutting the company’s profits might help in that direction too. But he did admit that the level set by Ofwat at which it would be economical to plug leaks was ‘purely a financial mechanism’, and even went so far as to acknowledge, ‘We may have to question whether it’s the right one.’ It could never be the right one because when decisions are taken on such a narrow financial basis, inevitably social and environmental costs are ignored.
Riddled with corruption and crawling with superfluous staff as many of the nationalised organisations in India are, no one could argue that they have given their proprietors – namely the public – value for money. Of late, the new competition with the private sector has made some of the natio
nalised banks more customer-friendly. And the threat of privatisation has improved the performance of some nationalised manufacturing companies. The nationalised company generating electricity from thermal power and the nationalised company making heavy electrical equipment have already shown that there are exceptions to the rule that all the industries in the public sector are unprofitable. But when I discussed this issue with the economist Rajiv Kumar, he warned me, ‘The exceptions are islands. Nothing should be written which suggests that there is anything to say for most of the public sector in India!’
The major problem with the Indian public sector is that the nationalised companies are treated as milch cows by politicians, providing not only money and perks but also opportunities to please their constituents by employing some of them. The politicians fight privatisation to protect their own interests and yet, supported by the trade unions, mutter socialist mantras and manage to convince the poor they are fighting for them.
There is one outstanding exception to the rule that politicians inevitably have a malign influence on Indian public sector organisations, and it’s a surprising exception: the railways. The Indian railways are a little like Lord Jagannath’s chariot in Puri. They roll on at their own speed, crushing anyone who gets in their way. They are the world’s largest employer, with far too many employees. Their management structure is hierarchical, based on the Buggin’s turn principle, by which long service rather than merit is rewarded by promotion, and tied up in the red tape of government procedures. Political pressures distort management decisions.