A high powered Indian delegation had paid a visit to China in the beginning of the sixties and started a green revolution in India based of Chinese experience. Initially, it was related to agriculture later it was extended to forestry and wasteland development also. To ensure the natural balance of flora and fauna, an organization called Ecological Survey of India (ESI) was established in 1964 at the national level and had one centre in each of the states. The locations of the state centers were Udhampur, Chandrapur, Silchar, Pathankot, Hyderabad, Tezpur, Palampur, Cochin, Imphal, Bikaner, Ootcamund, Nainital, Rewa, Gopalpur, Dehradun, Jamnagar, Shillong, Chhindwada and Guwahati. ESI had its headquarters at Shimla in Himachal Pradesh and controlled all the state centers in the country directly. The major functions of ESI were related to field work. The staff had to identify wasteland, plan for its development, plant tress, and shrubs, and sand stabilization plants in the desert of Rajasthan and pine, fur, deodars in the higher ridges of J & K, himachal Pradesh and in the Eastern States. Since it was a speacility work, the staff had to be selected, trained and posted to various state centers centrally by ESI. ESI had 1000 officers of various grades. 10,000 supervisors in various categories and approximately 50000 field staff. The field staff was divided into various categories like agriculture assistants, surveyors, draftsmen, planters, field guards, clerks, drivers and other administrative staff like cooks, barbers, washmen etc. the requirement for enrolment of staff was projected by state centers to ESI on a yearly basis and ESI took action by advertising the requirement in national dailies.
Training Institutes
ESI during its development had established institutes to train various categories of staff. The Agriculture Engineering Institute which was located at Shillong was training employees who were sent by ESI after selection and recruitment. The Driving and Maintenance Institute which was located at Trivandrum trained drivers in driving various types of vehicles and mechanical plants and were also supposed to carry our basic maintenance of such vehicles and plants on the spot as moving of these vehicles and plants from remote areas was neither economical nor practical. The Clerks and Computer software Institute was located at Nagpur and trained a raw individual into a full fledged clerk. The training period for them was of 14 months. During the period an individual selected as a clerk was to have a typewriting skill of 40 words per minute, and had to be physically tough to be able to sustain in the mountainous terrain that prevaild in Ladakh region of Jammu & Kashmir in the North and Arunachal Pradesh in the East.
CLERKS AND COMPUTER SOFTWARE INSTITUTE
The Institute had a capacity to train 2000 individuals at any one time. It also conducted head clerks, office supervisors and PA’s modular courses ranging from three month to six months duration. These courses had proved to be an asset to the organization. The training institute was headed by the director from within the ESI cadre of officers and had teaching staff of ESI which reverted back to field work after completion of the tenure.
FUNCTIONS
Each of the state centers had self- sufficient sub-centers spread over in the state where ecological work had to be undertaken. Each centre generally had 7 to 8 projects going on at any given time. Each project took about five years after it was launched. The staff once posted to any of the sub-centers was dedicated and was not transferred except on extreme compassionate grounds. All the staff had to be physically fit, mentally robust and psychologically sound to sustain the hostile climatic conditions that prevailed in the areas of work. Officers, supervisors and class IV staff had to stay in a temporarily erected camp or close to the site of project, generally away from habitation. Project camps in central Indian states were close to a city/ town and therefore, the families could stay with them on a permanent basis, subject to transfer.
Review
A systematic procedure existed at ESI to review the work of each of the sub-centers and training institutes on a yearly as well as five yearly basis as net outcome was only possible once the project was complete. However, for training institutes, the yearly review was in vogue. In the review of the training institutes conducted in the year 1988, the Review committee of ESI recommended that the Clerks and Software Institute, Nagpur should be closed down as it was proving to be a “White elephant”. The recommendations were based on Pran Kishore, director general’s personal views, who was of the opinion that “Teeth to Tail” ratio be reduced and that the training of clerks and computer software programmers, etc. could be conveniently undertaken by state centers under direct control of state centre directors who would train within their own recourses before being posted to sub-centers/ project locations. To facilitate initial training he agreed to pool some training staff of the institute to various state centers against the field vacancy. He further appreciated that the saving so accrued could be fruitfully utilized in the main project work. The views of the Director General prevailed and closure of the institute was ordered in the year 1990. On the above analogy, the Driving and Maintenance Institute, Trivandrum was ordered to be closed the following year.
Process of Closure
The process of closure took about six months. All typewriter machines, training material, furniture, vehicles, and administrative staff had to be sub-allotted to various state centers on the approval of the director general, ESI. The work of closure was smooth but painful because an institute which had proved its excellence in training and the staff that had graduated from the institute stood the test of time in varied areas with different climatic conditions. Pran Kishore retired and Chaman Lal took over as Director General, ESI in 1990. He stalled the decisions of closure of the driving and maintenance institute, Trivandrum as he felt that vehicle and plant drivers if recruited from the mainstream of the country would not be able to undertake work for a prolonged period of time in hostile terrain and climatic conditions.
Aftermath
The closure of the Clerks and Computer Software Institute at Nagpur by the previous Director General, ESI was a topic of discussion during the dinner hosted by the state unit of ESI. Most of the officers of ESI felt that off late they had noted with concern the decline in quality of staff work in various state centers. Office procedures had declined and compilation of current work had accumulated making it difficult to retrieve the old data. There had been a lack of administrative staff support. Reports and returns were not being forwarded to ESI HQ regularly. Some of the officers felt that the situation was likely to worsen further.
QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION
Q.1 Discuss the decision making process adopted by the two senior executives in this case.
Q.2 Who is right? Support your answer with relevant arguments.
Q.3 What should be the next decision of chaman lal? Should the Clerks and Software Institute Nagpur be reopened?
