Kanhaia Charan Khanna exit as SAIL chairman seen as beginning of train of hiring and firing

Khanna: Dramatic sackingThe only dramatic thing about Kanhaia Charan Khanna, 57, the ousted chairman of the mammoth Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), - turnover last year Rs 601 crore - was his exit.Last fortnight, while the suave, silver-maned, go-getting technocrat was chairing a meeting of the authority's 15-man board of directors, five of his directors were being interviewed - without the chairman knowing anything about it - at the offices of the Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB), a bare two kilometres from SAIL headquarters. The object of the interview: to find a person who could replace Khanna within two days.The PESB chief, Rusi Bilimoria, himself a former SAIL chairman, charged the situation with unsuspected irony when he chose S. Samarapungavam, 46, managing director of Indian Iron and Steel Company (IISCO), a SAIL subsidiary.Early this year, Samarapungavam was removed by Khanna from the post of managing director of the prestigious Bokaro Steel Plant and shunted to the less important IISCO. Two days before Bilimoria began his exercise on the advice of Union Steel Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had told Mukherjee about the decision, taken in her own secretariat.It was so meticulously kept secret from Khanna that even while the interviews were on he thought they were meant for the selection of the chairman of the Vizag Steel Plant, recently de-linked from SAIL. After his removal, Khanna was offered the chairman's post at the Mineral Development Board, a small office often ridiculed by ministry wags as a "registered society".New Attitude: The Khanna saga exemplifies the new stance the Union Government is adopting towards the present clutch of managers of the country's 163 Central public sector units. As a senior member of the PESB said: "A feeling has grown among the heads of public sector undertakings that their jobs will be secure only as long as they can prove themselves to be dynamic. And this sort of dynamism is limited to rhetorics and public relations work. This trend needs to be discouraged."Khanna, who hiked SAIL's public relations budget fourfold from Rs 1.58 lakh to Rs 6.87 lakh since his appointment in October 1980, bent over backward to put an outward shine on the organisation. So anxious was he to show a profit in the SAIL balance sheet for 1980-81 that the annual general meeting, slated for September, had to be indefinitely postponed.The audited loss of Rs 12 crore was ultimately turned into a marginal profit of Rs 1.3 crore by annexing Rs l3.3 crore from the small-scale sector's contribution to the Steel Development Fund (SDF) in a major procedural about-turn. When the face-saving red-into-black operation was complete, and the annual general meeting was about to take place, came the news of Khanna's removal.Though an affable administrator, Khanna had apparently rubbed too many officials the wrong way, largely in his bid to pack SAIL with 'trusted' men. The directors were bypassed in a number of cases, and 'non-Board' directors were invested with summary financial powers.As a result, a number of top officials either resigned or went on long leave. S. Casa, the commercial director, resigned in disgust as a marketing director who is not a Board member annexed most of his powers. The managing director of Bhilai Steel Plant, E.R.C. Shekhar, resigned and went off to Nigeria.Quick Shuffles: Samarapungavam himself had resigned and was to be released this fortnight had the situation not taken a dramatic turn. The general manager of Bhilai Steel Plant, Udayan Sen, gave up his job following a bitter wrangle with Khanna, N.K. Singh, additional director of personnel, and CM. Mahapatra, chief personnel manager of Vizag Steel Plant, went on long leave after they fought with Khanna.Altogether 300 executive staff (total number of SAIL employees: 235,000) were shuffled in Khanna's 13-month tenure. "My commitment is to higher production, not to stability of executive chairs": that is how Khanna explained away his strong-arm methods in the face of queries from the Steel Ministry.However, a lot of his claims of production gains do not stand up to scrutiny. He trumpeted the fact that saleable steel output in 1980-81 had gone up to 4.746 million tonnes from 4.592 million tonnes in the previous year.But this was achieved - embarrassingly for him - by just rolling away the 7 lakh tonnes of ingot buffer stock left behind by the previous regime. In terms of ingot steel, the 1980-81 production actually dropped to 5.480 million tonnes from 6.249 million tonnes the previous year and 6.286 million tonnes in 1978-79.Talking to India Today after his removal, Khanna rebutted all the charges against him, cited latest figures to prove that even ingot steel production was up by 1 million tonnes this year - which would have happened anyway because of improvement in the infrastructure - and repeatedly said that the Steel Ministry was "never gunning for me". He said: "Till the day of my removal, I'd heard only praises."Surprise Decisions: But that may well be an over-simplification. In a surprise move recently, both the up-coming steel plants at Vizag and Paradip were taken away from the tentacles of SAIL. The Centre also shook the dust off the Mohammed Fazal committee report which recommended restoration of SAIL to its original holding company status with the constituent units enjoying more autonomy. It was a threat to Khanna who had considerably curbed the power of the plant managing directors and was known as a 'unitarist' rather than a 'federalist'.The exit of Khanna, who is the senior-most among all public sector managers in the country, may be the beginning of a spectacular train of hiring and firing. As the PESB member said: "The Government is evincing a keen interest now in the actual performance of managers." He added that the units to come under regular review are the infrastructural ones covering coal, railways and energy set-ups.In fact, the ministers for steel, railways and energy have suddenly begun to give audience to a large number of middle-level managers in the units controlled by them. The anticipated shuffling spree has thrown many a technocrat into jitters. As one of them ruefully admitted : "No head is too firmly fixed on the shoulders to roll."Published By: AtMigration Published On: Oct 25, 2013 11:31 IST--- ENDS ---

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Kanhaia Charan Khanna exit as SAIL chairman seen as beginning of train of hiring and firing

The only dramatic thing about Kanhaia Charan Khanna, 57, the ousted chairman of the mammoth Steel Authority of India Limited was his exit.

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