Discrimination it was that changed the course of industrialisation in Maharashtra. Laxmanrao Kirloskar was overlooked for promotion at Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, Mumbai, in favour of an Anglo-Indian. Hurt beyond measure, he resigned his post and headed to Belgaum to join his brother, Ramuanna, in business. The year was 1897.
In Mumbai, while he was still teaching, Kirloskar had seen a Parsi gentleman on a bicycle. Enquiries he made showed that bicycles cost between Rs 700 and Rs 1,000 and were imported from England. He wrote to Ramuanna who said that these bicycles could be sold in Belgaum. Thus was born Kirloskar Brothers. Overlooked for promotion, Kirloskar threw himself into business full-time. That small business has now grown into a $1.2 billion engineering conglomerate.
From bicycles, the brothers diversified into windmills and steel furniture. Then the next turn of fate happened. Kirloskar was contracted to electroplate the personal temple of the king of Aundh, a small princely state between the British districts of Satara and Solapur. The king liked his work and gave him more assignments. The king’s death soon thereafter was a setback for Kirloskar. He returned to Belgaum and started making fodder cutters instead. A few years later, the new king invited him to set up a factory. The land given to him came to be called Kirloskarwadi. The Kirloskars gave India its first iron plough, pump and engine.
Cactus & Roses is the autobiography of Shantanurao Kirloskar, the eldest son of Laxmanrao Kirloskar. Written in 1982, it was published by Macmillan in 2003. A reprint came five years later. Shantanurao was born in 1903 and died in 1994, about a month before he would have turned 91. His career spanned many phases of the country’s industrial development. He started out at a time when industry was nascent, businessmen were happy to be traders and technology was the exclusive preserve of the West. One of his overseas collaborators forbade him to export in return for selling him technology — an agreement he later walked out of.
Next came the phase of nation-building coupled with deep mistrust of businessmen. Every shackle was put on them; enormous decision-making powers were vested with the government. This was the licence-permit-quota raj. Towards the end of his life, he saw the first winds of liberalisation blowing across the landscape. The book gives a good view of how businessmen thought and functioned in these three different eras.
Shantanurao, all his life, championed the cause of free markets. When the fourth Five-Year Plan was being formulated in the mid-1960s, he opposed the proposed public-sector outlay of Rs 21,000 crore. He was aware that the public sector was inefficient and the huge allocation could starve the private sector of scarce resources. Experience had shown that the five-year plans had added nothing to the country’s economic prosperity. Shantanurao Kirloskar was one of the few businessmen who suggested a “Plan holiday”, but their proposal was ignored. He became a bitter critic of the public sector as well as the Planning Commission. He even suggested that the Planning Commission should be wound up because of the distortions it had created in the economy.
The book is an honest account. Shantanurao Kirloskar, for instance, has recorded his conversations with “double-faced” politicians, though he stops short of naming them. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting read.
