The heat of the past months has let up to a couple of cloudbursts in Baroda, smothering the embers in its old walled city, at least at the surface. At the opposite west end, I am relieved to find my small (rented) flat and a once notorious motorcycle – proofs of my official permanent residence, all in good order. Many of the city’s thoroughfares are not as busy, but weather may take the benefit of doubt. In the evenings, of course there is a swell of adolescents and yuppie families around the new restaurants, fast-food joints and ice-cream parlours and the new shopping malls. It seems that there is a semblance of normalcy. Yet, trying to catch up with friends in various professions and businesses, I see an air of mounting cynicism and depression. This hangs everywhere, as I see of the adjacent Kheda, Bharuch and Panchmahal districts too. This attitude-set is way out of character for a region once known by its balance of innovators, visionaries and pragmatists, but seems to have come to stay.

For those ‘in exile’ at Mumbai, one had to work hard at culling out sense from reports in satellite channels and ‘English-type’ papers grappling with names, people, places in Gujarat and the correct pronunciation. I cannot go into the vagaries of convent education or elaborate on those city slickers who may have been to Oxbridge but have forgotten their high-school geography or those who mix current affairs with history in this article. Suffice to say that Hazarat Paga is an old locality; “Gujarat Paga” is non-existent. That the Patels suddenly acquired prosperity by becoming land-owners under post-independence reforms and thus gained bully power is a fallacious claim. That ‘Firing in the Kareli Baug Police Station jurisdiction’ is one thing, while ‘Firing in Kareli Baug’, a large middle-class residential area certainly means bad trouble. Likewise, I was not surprised to read of tension in Gorwa, but when my neighbours informed me that shops were attacked in nearby Ellora Park and Race Course, that was alarming. So also were the attacks on houses of some businessmen at the close-by Citizens’ Society. All this only shows how much out of the public eye this region has become. And what a downslide this has been!

Does anyone from those new-age media know, for example, that India’s first glider factory was at Baroda?¹ Or that the construction of the Gaekwad State Baroda Railways’ ‘Dabhoi Line’ raced cheek by jowl with the BB & CI’s Bombay-Thane line, the first in India’s rail history? And how many people care that the Gujarat Refinery was built with the first ever all-Indian project management team? That GSFC and GNFC were built to match the world’s largest capacities in urea fertiliser plants as far back as the 1960s? And, was it for nothing that Ahmedabad became ‘Manchester of India?’ Such is the colourful industrial history of this region. But history is not journalism. So what if it teaches you to understand the present! So what if riots in Godhra, Ahmedabad or Baroda are made to look like a fracas in Jhumri Talaiya to the worldwide TV audience?

The Baroda College and later Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, once noted for its pool of talent in the humanities, besides the medical sciences, social sciences, music, fine arts and engineering, is now a cesspool of petty politics and mediocre academics. The campus milieu, that once boasted names of Dadabhai Naoroji, R C Dutt (Economic History of India), V T Krishnamachari, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Vinoba Bhave, K M Munshi, Sri Aurobindo, – later the likes of M N Srinivas, I G Patel, I S Gulati, Rajani Kothari, N S Bendre, K G Subramanyam – to more recent luminaries like Sam Pitroda, are now a demoralised and nondescript lot, save the few bright exceptions that prove the rule. Each of the major buildings a showpiece in heritage architecture, now stand on props, cracked and weather-beaten, threatened with demolition for want of resources.

The state of Gujarat’s textile industry – from the model textile and tile factories promoted by Sayajirao Gaekwad, pioneering ventures by Ambalal Sarabhai, Gagalbhai Mafatlal and other Ahmedabad-based entrepreneurs to the institutions nurtured by the Lalbhai and Sarabhai families and others of their tribe – is too well recorded to rub salt here. Once path-breaking, now eclipsed by the Reliances, Grasims and Donears of this day. Giant smokestacks, the first icons dynamism and prosperity, now stand sombre, slouched over square-miles of dull, stony, grey slum-infested townships.

The pharmaceutical industry, which ushered in penicillin and the genre of antibiotics as well as several bulk chemicals, battles the market for visibility, caught between the MNCs and dubious formulators, obscuring the vision of Bhailalbhai Amin, scientific direction of Vikram Sarabhai, the daring of Ramanbhai Amin. These had showed the country its first penicillin plant and also led the market with a host of formulations – from the never-say-die Glycodin to a variety of life-saving drugs.

The engineering industry built India its first monobloc pump, hydel generator, HT circuit breaker and renewable energy systems, (road) paver-finishers, vibrating road-rollers, and a host of import substitution achievements. It now rattles along with regularly purged manpower, shrunk departments and trimmed product lines, waiting for the long promised infrastructure reforms and reeling under severe cash crunches from one Tender to the next – a ghost of the same industry whose stalwarts included the likes of Nanubhai Amin of Jyoti, the MIT and Cornell alumnus who not only steered so many of those firsts – and drew top-flight in talent from the world over – but went on to contribute to the policies of the World Bank in renewable energy, besides the governance of CSIR, the IITs, IIMs, and IISc, besides the Gujarat Energy Development Agency and MS University and other institutions, inspiring models in scientific temper and technological advancement in each of these.

Together, all the locally promoted private sector industries have suffered the worst of the restrictionist regimes and indiscriminate liberalisation. A few thousand families lived right into the late 1980s on the glory of their employers’ achievement and took pride in the professional recognition as well as respect by the employers. Today, their survivors live abroad or stay preoccupied with strategies to dodge or delay the pink slip. The employers, meanwhile, have died, migrated or just become too cynical to take any more promotional risks.

In parallel to the above developments, the first oil and gas strikes of western India at Cambay and Ankleshwar near Baroda saw central Gujarat becoming the site for mammoth projects in the petroleum sector from the early 1960s onward – from ONGC oil-fields and IOCL refineries to IPCL and its many downstream units to the fertiliser plants of GSFC and GNFC as well as bulk chemical plants of GACL and GHCL, besides all their ancillaries and value added processors. Not only did these involve large plants built on turnkey contracts and imported core machinery, these called for massive state investments in public utilities and such supporting areas, that eventually changed the landscape of the region. Their satellite units spread to areas like Hazira in south Gujarat, Gandhar and Valia in Bharuch district and Jamnagar in Saurashtra. Today, all these sit in wait of a takeover announced years ago, with all development plans on hold, their employees not knowing if they are coming or going. The slew of VRS packages and ‘re-organisation’ exercises has added to this demoralisation. Reliance’s expansion in Jamnagar is about the only happening industry in Gujarat and its investment figures account for about the entire figure of the state.

Hence, the models of state-and-industry collaboration or joint sector successes, beginning with GSFC that saw a massive spawn of bulk process plants are now in doldrums, not sure if they are to be bought or sold.

The 1980s also saw a drastic decline in the sustainability of development through mammoth projects, many of which needed a very high order of justifiability in the first place. Subsidisation in every form began to flag, while PSU protections began to get dismantled, as these units began to get uncompetitive, hanging on to the APM for dear life. In hindsight, few leaders now agree that Nanubhai Amin, through the Federation of Gujarat Mills and in the late 1950s, was right in warning the central government of the massive environmental damage and loss of agricultural produce, in selecting a very fertile belt of land for the fertiliser complexes, but it is too late. Deforestation and consequent loss of forest cover have taken their toll on the rainfall figures. Farmers undersold their land and got some contracts, etc, as promised by companies that bought them out. But today, these companies are neither able to reserve business areas nor give economic orders any more. Many more lost crops and cattle frequently from runaway fumes and spills from some of these plants, though the state’s Pollution Control Board has clamped down severely on offenders of late. The alternative land has, in most cases, been relatively fallow and everyone knows how cash compensations are. This has just brewed embitterment.

Missing Linkages

Here one remembers the late N B Amin’s refrain² that subsidies in any form – be they cash grants or central government funds for turnkey development projects – are like drugs, which may produce wondrous solutions in a short term but lead to severe complications from addiction, side-effects and withdrawal symptoms, seeing the power riots and the massive clouds of disdain, disgust and acute depression prevalent in the professional and economic firmament. Any project or growth plan must therefore provide a framework of activity, resources and time to ensure self-sustenance. Working in the corporate projects function of Jyoti, this was forever emphasised through directives, review excercises and case studies, in all our interactions. Something seems to have gone wrong here too.

All these large bulk process industries never spawned the engineering industry nor nurtured downstream units, neither the ancillary and feeder sectors as expected. Equipment was imported, foreign consultants and contractors hired on turnkey basis, raw material is supplied through a centralised channel and material is shipped out through another tight marketing network – a caucus or syndicate within each big company. All this created were thousands of petty sub-contractors and dubious traders, grabbing every bit of business by hook or crook, hand-in-glove deals and in turn breeding a culture of power brokers and all the associated ills. The best of corporates too had to go through these or forget business.

At a meeting with the newly-posted head of electrical engineering at IPCL very early in my career, introducing a new line of generating equipment (marketing was the first and last phase of a diversification project in my department) he was surprised that Jyoti and English Electric never approached them for business and while he had to send his engineers after us for quotes, yet Siemens, GE, even NGEF and L&T being out-station parties never failed to submit bids and chase orders for any requirement. I asked if he had thought about why these companies did not set up local branch offices but used their dealers or middlemen, despite the size of all their orders. He got the point quite fast. Then there were exceptions like S S Ganguly, the CMD there, who insisted that all engineering jobs be given to reputed companies first.

The banking sector never stood up to the demand for promoting whatever allied industries were feasible locally but went on with norms and priorities for lending that were planted on them. The regional and branch offices were not empowered or unable to infuse capital into their business cycles, nor did they take any original initiative to raise it, once nationalisation set in and the pace of industrialisation picked up, coincidentally. They just sought to rotate local funds, as it seems to date. Few rich farmers and traders are the only beneficiaries of this system, borrowing against their huge deposits. Haphazard lending, sometimes pressured, was occasionally made up by cracks of the credit-freeze whip, apparently to encash the wide exposures. By the late 1970s, ‘Gujarat = Bad Liquidity’ became the watchword in every all-India marketing operation – from cement and tea to conveyor belting. If local industry survived, it was due to conservative management of capital and shared credit along each value chain, some thing built on the vertrauen between the industrialists of the day – beyond the stuff of B-School brats heading companies now, nor the vidhwans of finance in Delhi and elsewhere. The large ‘national’ behemoths simply fell back on their monopoly positions with sleazy cash-on-order terms.

Local labour was never adequately trained nor motivated, owing to the sudden spate of projects, relatively low population density, peculiar locations of all these units and quite a lot of migrant labour was ‘imported’. This caused its own problems, including the extremist religious attitudes and recourses to strikes or violence, a never-before. Clerical and nursing jobs, also tyre repairing services are the monopoly of the Keralite, salesmen, accountants and bank officers are largely Tamilian while hard labour, transport, security and goods handling services are the reserve of strong-arms from UP and Bihar. Thus began the travails of the meek local job-seeker in Gujarat, who made good of whatever opportunity he got, eventually to use the skills and set up some small enterprise, if not bide time and migrate overseas.

With development concentrated so heavily on the old BB Line and National Highway No 8, roads and railways proved as veritable death-traps by the 1980s, power supply was under stress, educational, municipal and residential facilities (thanks to the land ceilings) became woefully inadequate and slum-like cities spawned in all districts for the first time. While practically no housing society application was cleared in Baroda by the state government, other cities saw thousands of ‘illegal’ housing societies sprawling all over, happily paying the fine of a few thousand rupees per tenament. Road, water and sanitary connections are still lagging behind requirement. Objections, cuts and delays in the Narmada Project have simply worsened the water-supply situation outside south Gujarat, whose rivers were to share water through the Narmada Canal and Mahi-Narmada Yojana. May be this factor and the industrial slowdown and now the riots will keep just one good thing going: low property prices.

Then came a deluge from the early 1980s into the 1990s, of DGTD and other centrally sponsored schemes and backward-area subsidy zones which had tie-ups with various financial institutions. Notwithstanding that term finance and working capital were a grey area, the idea behind these was that any professionally and technically competent entrepreneur could propose a viable scheme and stitch together a going industry.

Instead of building a land of enterprise, the above two types of developments brought in all kinds of renegades from many other parts of the country. People with questionable reputations and financial disputes of every kind came to the fore. Instead of competent professionals becoming entrepreneurs, clout became the creed for these licenses. Over-invoicing, pocketing of subsidy and cash loans for Mundhra Management salary arrears, bounced cheques, defaults in every possible outgoing payment, mass-scale bribery of labour and revenue officials and every known form of skull-dudgery became the norm of these new entrepreneurs. They brought in a bunch of corrupt managers who set new standards in greed and skull-dudgery of every kind.

This trend of development gradually embittered the Gujarati parvenu, always used to decent practices business and governance. All the industrial expansion in the district put more pressure on housing by the mid-1980s while it became inevitable to anyone seeking a professional career that a 100 km commute was inevitable. The prospect of living abroad despite a lower social standard and toughened conditions in the west and west Asia became an attractive alternative to lead a ‘clean’ life, in day-to-day matters. The alternative – a support to plot-owning families, by that time, came through a rise in property prices and loopholes for ‘property development’ resulting in a flood of ‘complexes’ that are even yet to be fully occupied.

Institutions in Disarray

The end of the century saw another twist: many industries from the new lot have crashed after the subsidy or risk capital dried out and imports were liberalised, making the professional opportunity situation only worse. Since 1992, an increasing number of engineers, designers, architects, doctors, accountants and managers are most grudgingly leaving this region for better prospects, discounting the usual flow of emigrants. Several ‘do up-down’ (i e, commute) to as far as Pune if the money is good. One MIT postgraduate even takes up assignments in Bangalore. But this applies to the lucky or talented few. For the rest it is another story. Several scores of bungalows and high-rise buildings that mushroomed through the 1980s and 1990s now look deserted, with half the houses locked.

For a long time, public representatives at all levels were really community leaders – locally respected academics, educationists, doctors and lawyers besides visionary industrialists that you know many of. This made a difference in as everyone felt part of the political process, being able to approach or influence the power-that-be if there was an issue. Many went ahead and handled issues themselves. A large number of roads in housing societies continue to be laid and maintained on cost-sharing between the society and municipal corporation, for example. And you know how the various agricultural co-operatives have succeeded. However, with votebank politics taking centre stage, the representatives are just puppets of the Delhi high command – vote-getters and money-bags with zero leadership, zero judgment and zero competence. The decline began in the 80s while the previous government of Keshubhai took the state to the pits! The avenues in yearly dialogues between industry bodies and various levels of the government, where each would share its commitment and expectations, all dried up. Gujarat long ceased to have effective representation in Delhi, while I find states like Haryana, Karnataka, Rajasthan of late, and Maharashtra going from strength to strength in this regard.

As a result, all good institutions – from the universities to the few joint-sector and state government enterprises, cooperatives and even the dairies as well as bodies like the Gujarat State Transport Corporation, Gujarat Electricity Board which had done exemplary work in power conservation and India’s first nodal agency for energy development, GEDA, the Gujarat Ecology Commission, Gujarat Engineering Research Institute that has played a pioneering role in irrigation, ATIRA in textile research – are at various stages of ‘headlessness’ or collapse, for want of a comprehending and responsible direction. And no bhadralok wants to see his progeny having anything to do with a politician.

To the phlegmatic, mild-mannered but resilient and perceptive average Gujarati, there was but one ‘hyperlink to happiness’, despite this decline: work in the US or the Gulf. At one end of the spectrum, in one community, there are second-generation doctors who would return from the UK or US with a new specialisation and diagnostic equipment while another family sees their son returning with an MBA and a foreign collaboration; at the other end, in another community, a construction worker would return from few years in Saudi or Kuwait to set up a small workshop, garage, photocopy centre, STD booth or DTP unit. Well and good if it went well. Otherwise there would always be a second try in a few years if not a younger brother’s similar stint adding to the family’s coffers. This initiative too is now frustrated. Just one Regional Passport Office services a five crore populace – practically every house if not village of which has at least one member in New Orleans, Philadelphia, London, Toronto or Adelaide if not in Kuwait, Jeddah, Dubai or Muscat. Requirements have been unrealistically tightened over the last couple of years, making it six months or more to process an application.

9/11 with its further squeezes on prospects in the US, the EU in an economic flux and a relative industrial stagnation in the Gulf region have neither helped this situation. So the younger generation has every reason to be disgusted and angry at the state machinery and the system as a whole. Each one burns to hit out at whom he sees as the oppressor, for spoiling the quality of his life. Spice all that up with some jingoistic social education on both sides and what do you get? Haves vs have-nots along every line.

There is an increasing amount of correlated evidence by voluntary groups and NGOs to suggest that there was a systematic plan and a centre of command. There are suggestions that manpower had been ‘imported’ for over a week, who had been indulging in hooliganism and helping themselves to hawkers wares, all along the rail route. Just as the state government is creating an alibi in these riots for not doing any work, the central one seems to be doing the same thing by whipping up war hysteria and neglecting all its responsibilities.

I am jarred to find an increasing number of people boasting of ‘the first Hindu retaliation’ as though there was no incident earlier. When I ask why they did not go to Godhra to hit back at those who they thought were the attackers of the train instead of hitting out at their own innocent and poor neighbours, they normally nod to say ‘you have a point there’. Some shake their heads and say ‘but we told them we didn’t have any personal grudge!’ A friend was accused of aiding communal elements because she helped a Muslim vegetable vendor with little money to re-start his business. He was married to a Hindu, incidentally, and had lost his house and all belongings in the riots. A professor of Sanskrit had his house and library burned to cinders because he was a Muslim who ‘dared to touch our scriptures’. What more is there to say?

Obviously the fires have burnt longer and the burns are deeper than what appears here. Perhaps the pragmatic state leaders know that they cannot muster the massive resources neither change courses radically, to correct the social and economic inequities created by their predecessors, now in the opposition. If one cannot quench a fire, why not rub a little ice and lotion? It cools – does it not?

Notes

1 The Maharaja had commissioned a German aviator to assemble gliders at a workshop that was subsequently wound up during the run-up to second world war.
2 Last referred in Jyoti News, No 75 of May 1999, commemorative issue on Nanubhai B Amin; Statement to an FICCI committee on energy about 1978 also reflects this sentiment; Speech at 2nd International Conference, Central Board of Power and Irrigation, Baroda, 1997.