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I
Introduction
Far from being a monolithic and unilinear phenomenon, neoliberalism
as evidenced by the case studies presented in this special issueassumes
different trajectories in different socio-economic and spatial contexts.
Dilip Subramanian is at CMAC-Neoma Business School and Georg Simmel Centre (CNRS/
EHESS), France. Email: dilsubra@gmail.com
Based on my ethnographic research on one particular public sector enterprise, Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) Ltd, I provide a case study
of how market liberalisation effectively ended public sector industries
monopoly access to the domestic market established at independence.
I further show that the ruling elites political decision to expose stateowned firms to the free play of market forces with a view to stimulating cost consciousness and profit maximisation in these industries was
taken much earlier than 1991the officially consecrated starting point
of economic reforms.
Hence, if we want to understand these neoliberal reforms, an analysis
must start in the 1980s and pay attention to the theoretical and practical
motivations guiding these transformations. Already during the mid-1980s,
policymakers believed that shifting from regulatory planning to economic
liberalism would improve public sector firms financial performance and
reduce their dependency on public funds. The rigours of competition
were seen as the ideal solution to eliminate the anomalies said to plague
state-run companies, and ensure greater efficiency.
Market mechanisms, so the argument went, would infuse the discipline that bureaucratic coordination and monitoring had failed to provide.
However, as I demonstrate in this article, the effects of neoliberal restructuring were rather different. Restructuring pushed and pulled public sector
firms in two opposing directions. On the one hand, they were exposed to
a competitive market established by state deregulation. On the other, they
remained under state regulatory controls, while their competitors were
subjected to none of these constraints.
Despite the availability of extensive literature exploring the reforms
of the 1990s (see inter alia Ahluwalia and Little 1998; Cassen and Joshi
1995; Joshi and Little 2001; Krueger 2002; Mukherji 2007), there is still
a dearth of micro-level inquiries assessing the effects of deregulation
on the operations of former state-owned companies, let alone what this
meant for the organisational structure of individual firms right down to
the individual worker. This article engages with these issues and draws
upon an ethno-historical case study of ITI.
Following David Harveys (2005) critique of neoliberalism, I first argue
that Indian-style liberalisation, as experienced by state sector enterprises,
had little to do with establishing a free, transparent and self-sustaining
market environment congruent with the doctrinal canons of neoclassical
economics. Rather, a market was created where companies defined by vast
Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 73102
resource differentials and granted highly unequal entry terms faced each
other with consequences that proved disastrous for public firms. As the
introduction to this special issue makes clear, the practice of neoliberalisation necessarily stands at odds with the utopian ideology of neoliberalism (cf. Harvey 2005). In the case of ITI, a combination of internal
managerial failure, ideological prejudices and policy double standards
was cause and symptom of the hammer blow inflicted on the companys
chances of withstanding the challenges of the post-reform era.
The second objective of this article is to challenge scholarship emanating from pro-reform circles, both within government and academia, that
seeks to portray market liberalisation as a gradual, relatively slow-paced
transition in consonance with the exigencies of a democratic polity as
complex, diverse and factional as India (Ahluwalia 2002, 2004; Jenkins
1999). Based on ITIs example, I shall show that such a (re)reading of
events is erroneous and misleading. On the contrary, ITIs exposure to
competition was sudden and worsened by the governments refusal to
provide the firm (and by extension, other state-controlled enterprises faced
with a similar predicament and which did not fall into the select category
of Navaratnas, the nine jewels, such as the public sector steel plants
[see Strmpell, this issue]) with the resources and time required to cope
with deregulated conditionsdespite officials stressing the importance
of building a robust indigenous manufacturing base.1
I argue that the neoliberalisation of the 1990s thus saw three concomitant and mutually conflicting forms of state practice with respect to
some of the enterprises under its aegis: a retreating state that reduced
its shareholding in public companies; a dirigiste state that continued to
intervene vigorously in public companies affairs; and a predatory state
that proceeded to cream off revenues via a partial privatisation even while
denying financial assistance for ending the pilloried inefficiencies.
To substantiate my argument, section II examines the impact on ITI
of the removal of entry barriers to the telecommunications equipment
manufacture segment. Sections III and IV explore how the firm
The central government initially identified nine public sector enterprises (this figure was
later hiked to 15) as Navaratnas, essentially on the basis of their size and strategic importance
to national interests. In order to enable them to achieve global pre-eminence, these Navaratna
entities were entitled to special status, benefiting from conditions of considerable financial
and operational autonomy, denied to other public firms.
1
II
The emergence of competition since the mid-1980s
If one is to assess neoliberalism in India, it is important to recall that already in the early 1980s, competitive pressures rocked certain branches
of Indian industry. Some scholars argue that the package of measures
launched in the early 1990s was very different from the incrementalist
approach to reforms adopted during the mid-1980s (Ahluwalia 1995: 15).
However, the former Reserve Bank of India Governor, I.G. Patel (1998),
for one, dates the starting point of Indias liberalisation process to the New
Economic Policy initiated by the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1985.
One such segment illustrative of this dynamic was the production of
telecommunications equipment where policymakers decided, in March
1984, to eliminate some, but not all, entry barriers. Indian private companies were authorised to take up the manufacture of customer premises
equipment (telephones, fax machines, modems and private branch and
automatic exchanges). For ITI, this signalled the first breach in the
Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 73102
monopoly power it had exercised over the domestic market since 1948,
for the manufacture of the entire range of telecommunications equipment
from large automatic exchanges to telephones. The loss of its exclusive
control over the market, and with it, the system of guaranteed orders and
prices, the bedrock upon which the firms fortunes rested, thus predated
by several years the official declaration of neoliberal economic reforms.
The advent of competition did more than just erode ITIs revenue
stream. It also provoked a sea change in the public sector firms relations
with its administrative authority and principal customer, the Department
of Telecommunications (DoT). The DoT had not only been responsible
for appointing ITIs chairman, it had also decided all issues of strategic
importance, such as capital investment, choice of technology, product lines
and annual production volumes. If the power equilibrium clearly weighed
in favour of the DoT, during the monopoly era, bonds of reciprocal dependency also linked both sides. Deregulation would fundamentally reshape
the terms of this alliance and establish markedly divergent end goals for
both the parent body and its industrial arm. An analysis of the subsequent
relationship of these two actors then serves to uncover the ideological
fiction lying at the heart of the supposed introduction of a free market.
Instead of placing both parties on a more or less equal footing, mutual
dependency was turned into unilateral dependency, as I will show later.
One explicit aim of the central governments decision to open the
market had been to try and satisfy the huge demand for telephone connections. By 1985, the waiting list for new connections had climbed to about
842,000, while the average waiting period stood at 2.67 years compared
to 1.5 years in 1980 (Mani 1989). The inflow of private investment into
telephone production paradoxically left the industry saddled with high
levels of excess capacity. Several new players, therefore, sought to build
market share by slashing rates. Between 1986 and 2002, prices of telephone
sets dropped by a vertiginous 81.6 per cent.2 This fall in prices obviously
suited the DoTs interests. As the exclusive buyer on the market, the DoT
could now purchase telephones at a fraction of earlier prices. But the effects
would prove disastrous for ITI and severely undermine the profitability
of its telephone activities (Subramanian 2010).
2
In April 1986, the sales price of an ITI-made push button set stood at `1,033.33. By
200203, phone prices had dropped to `190 (source: ITI Bangalore Telephone Division
Records).
III
Contradictions of neoliberal state control and
neoliberal market forces
From 1991 onwards, both Indian and foreign private companies were
authorised to invest in all areas of the telecommunications equipment
market. Over the next few years, leading transnational corporations such
as AT&T, Alcatel, Ericsson, Fujitsu, NEC and Siemens would establish
5
Emphasis added.
IV
Workers contrasting reactions to deregulation
On the eve of economic reforms, ITI employed 32,300 people on its rolls.
Nearly half of them were concentrated at its flagship Bangalore factory
and the remainder in six other production units (three of which were in
Uttar Pradesh). Semi-qualified for the most part, workers were essentially
male, an incongruity in an industry where the majority of the tasks are
sexually stereotyped by employers as female.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 73102
relatively large monetary package since ITI, being a central public sector
enterprise, had the capacity to pay.
Yet, this did not preclude workers, especially old-timers, from expressing a strong sense of regret, even bitterness, as they nostalgically
contrasted the present decline in ITIs fortunes with past prosperity. These
sentiments were never more acutely experienced as when they encountered material and spatial embodiments of the companys decline: disused
machines, silent workspaces, shut down offices, idle workers. To these
signs of inactivity and abandon, increasingly visible since the late 1980s
and which echoed their own ageing, workers counterpoised memories of
past activity, testimonies to their own once youthful vigour: Indian and
foreign dignitaries flocking to the factory to witness its technical prowess;
the plant working round the clock during the peak production months of
December to March in order to meet annual targets;10 the din generated
by scores of lathes running at full speed in the automatic machines shop;
and the powerful head of personnel into whose office workers entered
tremblingwhere now stacks of dusty files stood piled.
ITI employees also found humiliating press reports comparing the
enterprise to a sinking ship or a dinosaur. Of a piece with official
commentary, the use of these tropes served to discursively construct stateowned companies as a cumbersome relic the country now had perforce to
bury if it was not to be stuck forever in the rut of the Hindu growth rate.
For those, however, who had devoted several decades of their life to building the company by their hard work, such representations, by underlining
the probable death of ITI, left them, no doubt, with the impression that
their entire careers had been in vain. Their loyalty to the firm had not been
rewarded by securing the foundations of future growth.
Nevertheless, unlike the managementwhich invariably tended to
place the burden of the companys problems on employees shouldersthe
latter showed more even-handedness, apportioning blame to both sides,
in addition to the government. Workers viewed the vast majority of their
colleagues as conscientious and sincere and willing to make sacrifices
for the sake of the company, if required. Nonetheless, they recognised the
existence of a number of shirkers in their ranks, singling out union officials
and their hangers-on as the worst offenders, followed by members of various cultural associations and workers who represented the company in
10
For many Indian companies, the business year does not span the conventional calendar
year; instead, it runs from April to March.
V
Workers reluctance to opt for voluntary retirement
Interestingly, in much the same way as the liberalisation of the Indian
economy got underway in the mid-1980s, so too did measures aimed at
rationalising public sector workforces. In October 1988, the government
already authorised enterprises under its control to offer voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) as a means of downsizing. Because existing labour
regulations made dismissals and layoffs an extremely arduous process for
big formal sector companies notably, reducing manpower by persuading
labour to voluntarily surrender jobs in return for monetary compensation became a convenient means of circumventing the law with the tacit
accord of the authorities. Public sector managements were informed that
funds for operating the schemes would either come from the administrative
ministries or have to be generated internally, as in the case of ITI where
DoT promptly declared it would extend no assistance.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 73102
A management note in 1987 claimed that ITI was still burdened with
2,700 surplus staff at the main Bangalore plant, out of a total of 18,011
employees, despite two production lines having already been phased out.
This prompted the company to toy briefly with the idea of VRS before
dropping it.11 However, once it experienced the full force of competitive
disadvantage, as entry barriers to all segments of equipment manufacturing were lifted in 1991, top management policies changed and cutting
manpower costs became the new corporate strategy. Recruitment of new
hands had already virtually ceased by now. But other options, more radical
in scope, also came to be envisaged.
A buyout plan was hence rapidly drawn up and over the following
decade, the size of the ITI workforce contracted by almost 35 per cent,
falling from 30,280 employees in 199192 to 19,692 in 200203.12 The
initial response to voluntary retirement (VR) was extremely favourable
as employees, attracted by the immediate prospect of obtaining a large
lump-sum amount, seized this opportunity to leave the company. The
only groups whom ITI sought to actively retain were technically qualified
personnel such as degree and diploma holders in electronics and electrical
engineering, as well as other engineering disciplines. These personnel were
declared ineligible for VR, though, as I have mentioned earlier, several
of them quit to join transnational corporations.
In 199192, the first year of the schemes introduction, ITI registered
a total of 1,593 resignationsabout 5.3 per cent of its workforce. Thereafter, the figure tapered away considerably (see Table 1), for reasons to
be explained later, until 200102 when the numbers again began climbing
following an increase in severance payments. Overall, between 199192
and 200203, ITI spent `2,368.60 million on 8,777 golden handshakes
with individual severance benefits averaging on aggregate `270,000.
Going by the managements statements, this outflow rate was apparently dissatisfactory, even though we find no precise objectives specified
in the available documents. Indeed, as early as June 1994, many officials
argued that the company would be hard-pressed to achieve its objective of
building a lean and efficient structure through the existing VRS, which
is restrictive and does not seem to weed out surplus staff.13 Following
Note to the Board of Directors, 232nd meeting, Item No. B9, June 1987.
ITI Corporate Personnel & Administration Department archives.
13
Minutes of 1st meeting, Company Goals and Objectives, ITI Bangalore, 9 July 1994.
11
12
Total
workforce
VRS claimants
as % of total
workforce
VRS
expenditures
( ` millions)
National renewal
fund repayments
( ` millions)
199192
1,593
30,280
5.26
162.60
Nil
199293
311
29,730
1.05
40.90
Nil
199394
500
28,633
1.75
67.30
Nil
199495
727
27,477
2.65
114.30
Nil
199596
684
26,272
2.6
162.60
199697
246
25,915
0.95
145
55
199798
902
24,552
3.67
139.70
285
199899
532
23,945
2.22
155.30
100
19992000
333
23,567
1.41
114.10
51.10
200001
537
22,914
2.34
208.80
Nil
200102
1,213
21,518
5.63
561.40
Nil
200203
1,199
19,692
6.08
496.60
Nil
Total
8,777
2.96
2,368.60
Year
50
541.10
Hirschman (1970), we could say that ITI workers opposed the managements invitation to exit with an unequivocal show of loyalty insofar as
they declined to leave the company. They were possibly reluctant to trade
away the long-term advantages that job security and the status of public
sector employment represented for short-term monetary benefits.
Workers unwillingness to demonstrate what the management termed
entrepreneurial spirit, no doubt, reinforced dominant-class stereotypes
branding public sector employees as deadwood and the like. But their
reluctance to seek alternate career opportunities was quite understandable,
given decelerating employment growth and increasing casualisation in
most sectors of the Indian economy at the time. Contrary to the airy affirmations of neoliberal economists, workers, especially those for whom
retirement was not an immediate prospect, knew, often directly via the
experience of family members of labour market conditions, of the consequences of accepting VR: either unemployment or low paid, irregular
Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 1 (2014): 73102
and unprotected jobs in the informal sector (see Strmpell, this issue, for
similar developments in a public sector steel plant).
Workers also gave other reasons for refusing the golden handshake.
First, many of them apprehended being swindled out of their compensation benefits by children, relatives or friends, or of losing it in imprudent
business schemes. Workers would invariably have one or two such stories
to narrate of misfortune befalling friends or colleagues. The constant exchange and circulation of such narratives could be interpreted as playing a
dissuasive function, a corpus of counter-examples designed to discourage
individuals tempted by the promise of immediate money that the separation package offered.
Second, they were reluctant to accept VRS because they saw it as
resulting in a loss of identity, self-worth and masculinity. Having entered
the factory, in many cases even before the age of 20 years, work was the
central reference point of their life-worlds, the constitutive element in
shaping their perceptions of social realities. Being gainfully employed
represented more than just a source of economic income. In the words of
a 60-year old telephone assembly worker employed in ITI for almost four
decades, When we bump into some of our colleagues who have gone on
VR, we really feel bad (bejaar) to see how they look. All the life (kalam)
appears to have drained out of their faces.14
ITIs predominantly male workers also expressed fears of having
to share domestic spaces once they stopped working. Because these
spaces were occupied by women and children during the larger part
of the day, they believed they would be perceived as a burden by the
rest of the household. As Joshi (1999: 201) has justly remarked, being
formally unemployed means a diminished patriarchal presence in the
household. This sentiment is unambiguously articulated by a telephone
assembly operative in the Bangalore unit who had joined the company
in 1964; though aged 58 years, he insisted he would carry on working
until retirement:
If I am still working and earning, I feel there will be discipline and
order at home. I will also get respect (mariayadei) both at home and
outside. If I am in service outside, service inside (i.e., at home) will be
good. If I ask for a glass of water now, my daughters-in-law will rush
14
to get it for me. Nobody now sits directly in front of me. They come
only when I call them.15
To these anxieties were added those caused by the lack of consideration
and respect that workers sensed they would generally encounter in social
interactions after retirement. To again cite Govindaraju: Neighbours and
other people will think that because I am retired I know nothing, that I have
nothing to do. And so if they invite me to a function or a marriage, I will
certainly come because I am simply sitting at home and not working.16
A third reason for declining VRS was that the status associated with
public sector employment enhanced the value of their male offspring
in the marriage market, who could expect to acquire both a good bride
and an appreciable dowry. If a reason commonly advanced by workers
for taking the buyout was that it enabled them to arrange the marriage
of their children, especially female offspring, the converse was equally
true, thereby underlining the gendered dimension underlying the decision
to accept or refuse early retirement. Remaining in their jobs for reasons
of status and recognition thus provides an interesting illustration of how
symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984) is translated into economic capital.
Lastly, workers apprehended the boredom, enforced idleness and
isolation that would accompany VR. All my interviewees, who either
spoke Tamil or Kannada, invariably used the English noun form bore,
or the Urdu vernacular bejaar (in this specific context, the word signifies
mental fatigue, apathy or listlessness), to describe their feelings of having to stay at home all day every day. Industrial work might have often
been monotonous, but it was at least a shared experience. Retired life,
on the other hand, threatened to hover as a timeless continuum, dissolving the separation that the factory clock had instituted, sometimes at a
considerable cost to their personal lives, between work time and leisure
and family time.
Workers attitudes towards the question of voluntary exit also owed
little to the trade unions position on this issuethey rejected VRS on
the grounds of their own thoughts and reflections on their life-worlds. At
the flagship Bangalore plant, for instance, where a single independent
organisation represented the totality of the workforces interests, the union
adopted a largely passive stance. For certain, the top union leadership
15
16
bemoaned the departure of large numbers of members and union representatives, acknowledging the loss occasioned by way of experience,
financial resources and numerical strength.17 However, it tended to treat
the matter as essentially one of individual concern, a choice confronting
each worker and in which it could not interfere. Accordingly, the union
limited its involvement to taking up with the management, specific cases
of worker grievances, related to either the selection modalities of VR
candidates or compensation payments.
To sum up, the ambivalent response of workers to the VRS threw into
relief two contrasting logics. On the one hand, echoing the free market
ethos overlaying neoliberalisation, VR clearly subscribed to a monetary
logic, proposing a straightforward cash for exit swap. That this trade-off
proved acceptable, even attractive, is attested to by the departure of almost 9,000 employees from the plant. Nevertheless, to this economistic
transaction, an even larger number of workers opposed a more contextual
social logic. Drawing on the personal experiential reality of everyday life,
many resisted the lure of the golden handshake, counterposing immediate
material gains to the more permanent loss that the lack of employment
could inflict on their subjectivities.
This section has shown how the managements assessment of ITIs
workforce lacked sufficient knowledge and awareness of the wider socioeconomic circumstances. This was one of many factors that ultimately
prevented the firms transition to the market-driven entity that official
rhetoric underpinning the Indian governments liberalisation agenda attempted to realise. The life-worlds of ITIs workforce did not allow for the
making of this kind of neoliberal India, attuned as it was to the Nehruvian
mould of labour relations where thanks to job security, decent wages and
generous welfare benefits, public sector employment represented the most
coveted positions in the labour market.
VI
Voluntary retirement targets non-performers
Overall, between 199192 and 200203, on average, 3 per cent of the
ITI workforce went on VR annually, a figure which, as mentioned earlier, failed to meet the managements expectations. So why did workers
17
Interview with Michael Fernandes, President, ITI Employees Union, Bangalore,
NovemberDecember 2001.
Many of them being quite aged lack the entrepreneurial spirit as well
to take the benefits of VRS and become self-employed.24
Though no study appears to have been conducted to assess the actual
labour requirements of each unit, thereby exposing the relatively arbitrary
character of its calculation, the management estimated that out of a total of
nearly 19,700 employees on the companys rolls in 2003, almost 11,000
were still surplus.
To sum up, from the managements perspective, VRS was a failure as
it encountered a poor response from the workforce with the result that
the company continued to be saddled with excess manpower. The relative failure of the buyout scheme had crucial chain effects, neutralising
the efforts being made in other areas to bring down manufacturing costs.
This severely undermined the companys ability to compete in an industry
characterised by declining profit margins.
VII
Conclusion: Neoliberal shock therapy and the
(un-)making of neoliberal India
A few broad remarks can be made by way of a conclusion. A combination of factors related to state policy decisions, high-level corruption, the
companys relations with the DoT and technological developments worked
in unison to bring about a dramatic deterioration in ITIs performance. Far
from achieving the governments stated objective of introducing greater
efficiencies in public sector enterprises, deregulation only succeeded in
weakening ITI by transforming a once-profitable firm into a chronic loss
maker.
In the words of the former ITI Chairman and Secretary, Department of
Electronics, under the guise of liberalization the government strangled
the public sector.25 It is unclear, however, whether he attributed the
governments actions to ideological considerations or the vested interests
of crooked officials, acting in tandem with lobbyists for foreign capital
and DoT functionaries intent on teaching ITI a lesson, as some former
24
Interview with S.K. Chatterjee, General Manager Personnel, ITI Bangalore Plant,
Bangalore, 6 July 2000; emphasis added.
25
Interview with K.P.P. Nambiar, Bangalore, 26 December 1998.
Acknowledgements
Comments and constructive suggestions from Daniel Mnster, Patrick Neveling and
Christian Strmpell contributed to considerably improve this article. My sincere thanks
to all of them.
27
Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian. 2004. From Hindu growth to Productivity
Surge: The Mystery of the Indian Growth Transition. IMF Working Paper WP/04/77. Available
at www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2004/wp0477.pdf. Accessed on January 2013.
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