Sumant Moolgaokar declared that the new factory that the Tatas would build near Pune must be as clean as a German hospital.
Moolgaokar was a visionary. A leader who set very high standards. But ‘a factory like a hospital’ seemed too much. It was tough enough to achieve our goal of building a factory to produce trucks and buses designed and built by Indians, with very sophisticated machines also designed and built by Indians. Perhaps we had no choice in that. The country did not have enough foreign exchange to allow the import of the machines. Why make our task even harder? Factories all over the world were messy, with steel filings and oil spilled on floors, and cotton waste scattered around. In fact, the stuff scattered around noisy machines was a symbol of industrial manhood, and an indicator of how busy the factory is.
Moolgaokar spoke through his actions. He would visit the factory site in Pune every week to see what progress was being made on the production side—the new machines installed; the productivity of those already running; the flow of products and their quality. The factory was very large. Moolgaokar was in his sixties, going into the seventies. He would go around the factory in a jeep with the general manager. He would stop at many places, to talk to workers and managers, and ask them what they were doing, and challenge them to do even better.
He had an uncanny eye to spot anything out of place. Even the cotton waste dropped in the factory aisle. He would ask the general manager to stop the jeep and point out that the factory must be as clean as a hospital. A German one, he would repeat, because the standard of housekeeping in most Indian hospitals was not good enough.
Soon, we got it. Before his visits, there would be a flurry of cleaning up. The general manager would drive through the factory the evening before to make sure it was clean. Moolgaokar was aware this was happening. This is the way everywhere, isn’t it? Clean the street and spruce up the office before a VIP visit. He said the factory must be clean every day, not to show off to VIPs, but because cleanliness is necessary for quality and productivity.
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When I was appointed the general manager, Moolgaokar urged me to take a long walk through the factory every morning. What he did once a week, I must do every day. To talk to workers and managers on the way. And to check up on the housekeeping. The factory was very large. I was much younger than him, and the long walks, which would take me an hour or two every morning, would be good for my health, he said. ‘Management by walking around’, is what American management gurus called it. ‘Learning by rubbing your nose on the shop floor’, is what Moolgaokar said it was.
One day I was walking through a machine shop with its manager. I noticed a piece of oily cotton waste on the ground. A worker, busy on his machine, must have wiped his hands on it. I bent down to pick it up. The manager tried to take it from me. I held on to it. He was very embarrassed. ‘What to do, sir?’ he complained. ‘It is difficult to keep the factory clean. Because it is so hard to change our Indian culture.’ We continued to walk. I was looking for a bin to drop the oily waste into. His discomfort was rising. After some minutes, when we were many metres away from the machine besides which I had picked up the piece, I asked him, ‘Where shall I drop this piece?’
Then we had a conversation about how cultures can be changed. Firstly, I said, I objected to his lamenting about the workers’ ‘Indian’ culture. It was our culture too. Secondly, I wanted to know what a worker should do, who was expected by his supervisors to mind his machine very diligently, with a piece of cotton waste with which he had wiped his hands?
One morning, when I was driving Moolgaokar through the factory, he said he wanted to go to the toilet. I said I would turn the jeep around and bring him back to the office. He asked, ‘Why? Aren’t there any toilets in the factory that the workers use? Let’s go to the nearest one.’ I stopped the jeep. There was a toilet only a few metres away. Workers in their blue uniforms were coming in and out.
Moolgaokar walked in, with me awkwardly behind him. He found a vacant urinal. And there, with startled workers in their blue uniforms relieving themselves in the urinals around, he did what he had to.
When we got back into the jeep, he asked me whether I thought the toilets were clean enough. I admitted they were smelly and not as clean as the officers’ toilets. He asked, why not? I said, lamely, that the usage of the workers’ toilets was much higher.
He replied, if that was the case, they should be designed and maintained accordingly. He said, if workers get used to better sanitation conditions in the factory, they may aspire for better conditions in the villages where they live, and they come from long distances to the factory, rushing into the toilets as soon as they arrive. They will become agents of change of cultures in their communities. ‘Think about it,’ he urged me. ‘And visit their villages and communities.’ Which I did.
Side by side with building and improving the factory, an infrastructure of institutions was built up, led by our workers, that improved the conditions in their communities— sanitation, schools, water supply, public health, etc. But that is another story.
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V.S. Naipaul had noticed the spirit of the young builders of a new India when he visited TeLCo’s factories in Pune in the early 1970s. He recorded it as a ray of hope, in his book India: A Wounded Civilization. Spurred on by Moolgaokar’s pursuit of excellence, the Tata factory in Pune became a showpiece of an emerging modern India. Indira Gandhi, when prime minister, would encourage all new foreign ambassadors deputed to India, as well as other foreign dignitaries, to visit the two Taj Mahals of India. The beautiful mausoleum in Agra. And the Tata factory in Pune.
Protocol required that the senior-most Tata executive in Pune personally show the VIP around the factory. By the time I rose to that position at the end of the 1970s, the trickle of visitors had become a stream. every month, there was at least one VVIP visit. Several heads of state visited. I declared myself as a chief tour guide for the new India!
Making the factory clean and presentable was no problem at all. It was clean every day.
The managers of the workshops would greet the visitor when our jeep entered their workshop. They would hop on to the jeep and explain what was being produced there. When we left their workshop, we would stop a moment while the manager hopped off. Invariably, the visitor would shake their hand and congratulate them on the quality of the workplace. The manager would convey the VIP’s appreciation to the workers, which would make them proud too.
During my daily walks around the factory, I was always looking for something new to explore. To get off the beaten track. Moolgaokar had introduced me to the workers’ toilets. Thereafter, I visited toilets in different workshops. Their cleanliness improved. My visits to the toilets made my walking about for a couple of hours easier for me too!
A year later, we had another visitor who had come to see with his own eyes what this Indian factory really looked like—the one that claimed that it wanted to be as clean as a German hospital! He was the CEO of a German engineering company which had an Indian subsidiary, with a factory nearby in Pune. He was especially keen to visit the foundry of the Tata factory which he had heard was a showpiece of indigenous Indian engineering.
He was dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and tie, ready for dinner. I drove him to the entrance of the foundry. On the way we became earnestly engaged in a conversation about engineering excellence and German culture. We were still talking when we stepped out of the jeep, which we had to, because the foundry was best seen on foot. And we continued talking animatedly while we were well inside the foundry. He suddenly looked at his watch and said, ‘Mr Maira, please let us go to the foundry soon. I am very short on time.’
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I grinned at him and asked him to look around. ‘You are in the foundry and have been already for the last few minutes,’ I said. He looked around in awe. Then he stooped down, brushed his finger on the foundry floor, and then brushed it on his forehead. Like he was applying a tilak to it.
‘It is so clean,’ he said. ‘Foundries, unlike assembly lines, can be excused for being dirty. Truly, this Indian factory is as clean as a German hospital!’ Not quite as clean as a hospital, I would say. But perhaps as clean as the cleanest factories anywhere in the world.
This excerpt from The Learning Factory: How The Leaders of Tata Became Nation Builders by Arun Maira has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.