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THE JOURNEY
51
I invited George Fernandes for breakfast and after breakfast when we sat down together and he started talking about the Udhna strike. I told George that our condition was that I will not talk about the strike, that the union will have to agree to retrenchment and come back to work unconditionally and then only I will talk about the other terms regarding wages and allowances. After 3/4 days of my meeting with him, the workers came back to work unconditionally. We retrenched the staff of about 100 people and the wages revision was also agreed upon on the basis of productivity. The efficiency thereafter improved.
Liberalisation hit Batliboi hard, we had to take some drastic decisions to salvage it...
Batliboi's business suffered heavily after the liberalization process began in 1991, mainly because the government did not initiate follow-up measures. Being predominantly in the capital goods industry, Batliboi suffered greatly in the years that followed and was on the verge of being declared a BIFR company. That's when I and my son Nirmal decided to do whatever it takes to salvage it. We began the herculean task of restructuring it, which required pumping in crores of rupees and taking some hard decisions. We closed down some of the loss-making divisions through VRS (voluntary retirement scheme) and concentrated solely on machine tool and the textile air-engineering business. The total number of staff was brought down from 2,400 at one time to 650. In fact, we had Introduced the VRS in 1995 before the others had even thought of it. The cost, though, was enormous since Indian labour laws did not permit retrenchment on normal grounds. Negotiations over VRS with labour Unions meant hard bargaining which was very time-consuming. We had to agree to three month's additional pay (apart from legal half month's pay) for every year's of service. Batliboi being an old company the VRS cost was about Rs.40 crores or more. This cost, though extremely high was worth it. But it paid off eventually and Batliboi not only turned around but once again became a profit-making company which was in a position to think of buying companies abroad as it recently did by buying a Canadian
The wrong sort of people are always in power because they would not be in power
if they were not the wrong sort of people - Jon Wynne Tyson
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