Abstract
ITI’s founding in 1948 as a departmental production unit of the department of Post and Telegraph (P&T, later Department of Telecommunications or DoT) reified the Nehruvian vision of a custodial role for the state in the economic sphere. Its incorporation as a company two years later did not alter the essence of its existence as a monopoly supplier of telecommunications equipment to the monopsonist P&T, while continuing to remain under P&T’s complete administrative control. The liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s that was so spectacularly instantiated in the telecommunications production and services sectors and which represented a breakdown of the ‘anti-Schumpeterian bargain’—to use Peter Evans’ phrase—did not transform the state-ITI relationship in any significant manner. In this meticulously researched and carefully argued monograph, author Dilip Subramaniam suggests the label ‘bureaucratic production regime’ to explore the triple foundation of state ownership, soft budget constraints and monopoly market power, and their ramifications for the company. This interdisciplinary interrogation of the strategic and tactical choices made by the state, ITI’s management, union and workers over more than half a century of its existence is enriched by copious references to sociological work originating in France where the author is based. The book’s stark analysis serves to illumine the reasons for the decline of this once-profitable state owned enterprise (SOE) and encourages a richer appreciation of the ‘public sector company as an unstable and shifting compromise between economic and social goals brokered by a medley of political forces’ (p. 665).
The first five chapters of the book deal with the political and economic strategies adopted by the state and management with regard to sector policies, technological choices, work practices, advent of competition and the transition to a fully competitive telecommunications equipment market. Given the low priority accorded to telecommunications services by policy makers in the initial years, ITI faced significant monetary and technical resource shortages. While the direct technology transfer route adopted for the strowger system at inception was a reasonable success, the author traces how incompatibility with local needs and inefficiencies on the part of the technology provider made the subsequent arrangement for crossbar systems an abject failure. Poor technological and managerial choices led to intra-organisational disputes and rivalries that were exacerbated by the dismal performance of ITI’s research and development department. A toxic combination of monopoly and state regulation caused many organisational dysfunctions such as material shortages on one hand and high inventories on the other, work shirking and overtime, quality lapses leading to delivery slippages, low machine, labour, capacity-utilisation as well as overpricing. The author is careful, however, not to endorse economic Darwinism, instead preferring to explain ITI’s declining performance in terms of the interplay between the policy environment, market structure and managerial shortcomings. A combination of poor policy decisions, absence of cost-consciousness and lack of managerial foresight in technological matters caught ITI totally unprepared for the advent of competition in both equipment manufacturing and services. The author argues that deregulation and partial de-nationalisation result in dual dependency among SOE that are subjected to both bureaucratic and market coordination without deriving the benefits of either, and ITI was no exception. Worker ambivalence to the company’s difficulties, ineffective managerial efforts at internal reform, poor intra-organisational coordination and lack of policy consensus regarding the company’s future—all contributed to its inevitable decline. While some of his conclusions supporting aggressive state intervention to aid ITI’s recovery are open to debate, there can be no denying the utility of the author’s analysis of the pathology of its failure.
The next three chapters add value to the corpus on industrial sociology by focusing on workers’ interactions amongst themselves—both individually and as a collectivity in the union—and with management. An ethnographic exploration of work in one of the assembly shops marshals some evidence to question the thesis—advanced by Harry Braverman—that employers systematically control each step of the labour process so as to dispossess workers of their knowledge and skill. The author speculates that the non-atomising, ‘craft-centred’ labour configuration in the shop was a result of management’s anxieties regarding workers’ resistance to change. In addition, the non-strategic nature of the particular assembly’s product line allowed workers to exercise significant autonomy in their daily work. A multivariate analysis of the sociological background of workers at the Bangalore plant of ITI to elucidate its nature and transformation follows; not surprisingly, the conclusions of the survey confirm the persistence of geographical, linguistic, gender and caste cleavages and discriminations among organised labour. This sociological survey forms the backdrop to an exploration of the growth and development of unionism in the plant that derived key features such as its independent plant-level nature and internal leadership from the broader workers’ movement in Bangalore, and was dictated by pragmatism and strategic considerations rather than by ideology. The unique flavour that this imparted to the three-way relationship between workers, union and management is more fully explored in Chapter 8 with respect to struggles around monetary, mobility and work-related issues that point to the workers’ capacity for autonomous action and a recurring ‘pattern of a dovish leadership capitulating to a hawkish base’ (p. 546). The last chapter, tracking the politics and enduring salience of language and caste in the Bangalore unit, serves to repudiate the teleology of modernisation theory and exemplify the failure of the Nehruvian modernisation project.
The success of the book lies in the erudite explication of the complex economic, political and sociological factors that give pause to pat allocative efficiency explanations of SOE performance and failure. Apart from its scholarly worth, this cautionary tale has particular resonance for many other enterprises, not excluding the public sector successors to DoT that share many of the strategic and operational characteristics of ITI. It makes us wonder whether ‘the articulation of a different institutional, normative and competitive mix’ (p. 657) is indeed possible in order to rescue these companies, the government and the public at large from the mire of their indifferent performance.