Siddharth Zarabi: Solid but uninspiring

BACKSTAGE

Anil K Sinha took over from another Sinha (V P) as the chairman and managing director of arguably one of the most coveted public sector jobs available in the country in September 2004. He will lay down charge at the end of the month, after having spent nearly 38 years in the company. Sinha, an engineering graduate and former lecturer, is one of the many officers in the cadre-based Indian Telecom Service (ITS), that lorded over the country's telecommunication monopoly for a long time.

The ITS, while quite similar to other cadres like the Indian Railway Service, is different from all of them in the sense that it has had to evolve and face tremendous competition from an aggressive private sector. So, while it remains seeped in the finest bureaucratic traditions "" due procedure and adherence to rules take precedence over all else "" increasingly, ITS officials realise that outcomes are key to their long-term survival.

To their credit, service officers have managed to evolve in the face of competition. They understand the need to be customer-focused, they try and provide service, and they are very smart with technology and good at extracting value from it. They have even attempted to understand the basics of marketing and however insipid, their advertising is perhaps the best PSUs offer "" after the PSU oil companies.

These are no mean achievements "" after all, BSNL, in its present day corporate avatar, was born only in October 2000, and its decision-making process remains hampered by political interference along with all the other ills that afflict state-owned enterprises. In effect, while the cadre ensures that BSNL has an exceptionally strong backbone, the top jobs are heavily lobbied for and once swung, the officers remain indebted to their political benefactors.

Amidst all this, Sinha, who has served two ministers "" the mercurial and savvy businessman Dayanidhi Maran and, for the last two months or so, the more political A Raja "" emerges as a survivor in many ways more than one. For starters, he managed to pilot the crucial order to buy more mobile line capacity. That order is big and given the way the public sector is forced to work, the controversies that surrounded it were equally big. Since public money is involved, every one has a stake in talking about it and perhaps the right to ensure that it is well spent.

Sinha, like his predecessors, would have wanted greater freedom from the ministry to run operations. While that is a valid point, insiders suggest that he could have done better within the existing constraints had he exercised greater pragmatism and asserted himself fully. Colleagues and juniors alike wish he had been more aggressive in taking decisions, perhaps the way a former chairman, the redoubtable Prithipal Singh, did. I last bumped into Sinha in the men's room of The Imperial a few weeks ago. Before I could even ask him what was going on, he shrugged and said, in Hindi, you know what's happening ... what can I do?

As he passes the baton on to fellow director (planning and new services) Kuldeep Goyal, who has been confirmed as the next chairman, Sinha may look back and wish he had been able to do more and much faster. His legacy is mixed "" while he ran things honestly and efficiently, he was never the rock star that this rustic behemoth really needs.