T N Ninan: The pioneers

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

Charat Ram, who died earlier this week at 89, belonged to a generation of Delhi businessmen who have now passed on""like MS Oberoi of the hotel chain that bears his name, HP Nanda of Escorts, Bhai Mohan Singh of Ranbaxy, Raunaq Singh of Apollo Tyres, and Gujar Mal Modi and KN Modi of Modi Enterprises, not to mention controversial personalities like Ramakrishna Dalmia. We still have with us Charat Ram's older brother, Bharat Ram, and Brij Mohan Lall Munjal, who has built the Hero group from scratch and made it India's leading maker of motorcycles and bicycles, but it is a vanishing breed that dates back to the days of India's Independence. At a time when business in India usually meant the presidency port-towns of Bombay, Calcutta and (to a lesser degree) Madras, these were the first generation of businessmen in northern India; they were home-grown and often rough-hewn, and they did not have the more evolved business culture of the presidency towns, but they were the pioneers.

Almost all were first-generation entrepreneurs; some, like Nanda, were Partition refugees who came across the border with little other than a desire to make good. Others, like Oberoi and Raunaq Singh, worked their way out of poverty and built considerable empires. Each was a personality in his own way.

Fate has not been kind to many of these men. Some did not die happy, while others' businesses did not do well after them. Bhai Mohan Singh fought with his oldest son and had little to do with Ranbaxy in his final years""a bitter story that mirrors what happened with Raunaq Singh at Apollo. However, in both cases, the companies have prospered in the hands of the next generation. In contrast, Nanda suspected that his sons would not amount to much; the group was split after his death, and the main company has been into sustained decline. The Modi family too has been involved in successive bouts of bickering, which have affected business. Oberoi was lucky; he had one surviving son, they did not quarrel, and Biki Oberoi has continued where his father left off.

Charat Ram was unlike most of these contemporaries. He was an inheritor whose father was Delhi's leading businessman, but with the inheritance came frustration. He had to play second fiddle to Bharat Ram, who was older, and he chafed all his life at the restrictions this placed on him. The business was carved up after years of squabbling but it was too late for Charat Ram to make any further contribution to the business. Also, unlike most of the others, Charat Ram was not a man inclined to spending much energy on winning friends and influencing people. He much preferred to focus on his business, at which he thought he was better than most of his contemporaries.

In his offices, he did not allow managers to have closed drawers, arguing that open shelving prevented papers and other junk from piling up unseen. When the municipal corporation failed to repair the road outside his house, Charat Ram got hold of a roadroller and tarred the road himself""getting in return for his pains a show-cause notice from the corporation, asking why he should not be penalised for messing with public property. Unlike all the others, he saw the need to induct professional managers and introduced a highly-paying management trainee scheme that, in the 1960s and 1970s, outdid the likes of Hindustan Lever when it came to attracting ambitious young men from the best colleges; many of those trainees went on to stellar careers, but sadly not in Charat Ram's enterprise, which entered a period of stagnation long before the eventual carving up.

He and his contemporaries functioned in a business environment far removed from today's world. It was not just the licence-permit raj and the extortionate tax rates; the stock market was a crooked casino, product markets were limited in size, and a patriarchal family-business environment seemed the natural way when trained professional managers would not leave the comfort of the multinational environment. No one would have dreamt then that, in the space of a generation, Delhi would be challenging Mumbai to become the country's business capital.