Sunday, March 12, 2017

Beginning of Productivity Movement in India



Charles Bedaux established  Eastern Bedaux office in India in 1937.  The company concentrated on time and motion studies to determine optimum labour strength and introduced incentive systems to maximize productivity. The company had significant success, particularly in textile mills. Thus involvement of management consultants started in Indian industry to improve worker productivity.

Bedaux was executed for collaboration with the Nazis in 1943. The Indian organization was headed by John Moore, an industrial engineer. He formed, a  company under the name IBCON (Industrial and Business Consultants) and continued operations in India. After the Second World War, Fern Bedaux, the wife of Charles Bedaux, came to India and filed a suit against IBCON, since IBCON was still using the knowledge base of generated by Bedaux. The matter was settled out of court, and she restarted the firm Eastern Bedaux. However, it was closed down quickly.


IBCON played a significant role. During the Second World War, it carried out significant assignments to help the government's war efforts, e.g., at Rifle Factory at Ishapur, Military Accounts in Pune, and movement of railway wagons to move war supplies by Central Railways. After the Second World War, IBCON grew and provided services to various industries. Apart from textiles, its operations extended to engineering, cement, and administration. It had consultancy assignments of long duration with Bombay Municipal Corporation, Times of India, Income Tax Department, etc.  IBCON undertook extensive assignments in Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (TELCO), various Tata textile mills, ACC, etc. In most of these companies, IBCON established "standards departments," and made them responsible to mplement IBCON reports. These departments later became "industrial engineering departments" and formed the basis for developing the industrial engineering profession in India.

Chapter 1 of the book
Management Consulting in India: Practice and Experiences for Business Excellence
edited by U. K. Srivastava, Pramila Srivastava,
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=w12JCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false


NITIE
NITIE was established in 1962 by the Government of India with the assistance of the United Nations Development Programme(UNDP) through the International Labour Organization. Steve Dembicki, who was a Chief advisor at ILO, and Vikram Sarabhai were instrumental in founding the institute. Its first on-site Director was Vinayak S. Vernekar who had previously worked at TISCO in Jamshedpur in the industrial engineering in the industrial engineering department.

 In India’s new economic
strategy, productivity growth was seen as the key to successful
industrialisation, and this was also a priority for the ILO’s
new Director-General, David Morse. The ILO helped to set up the
National Productivity Centre and supported the National Productivity
Council.

David Morse (United States) spent twenty-two years as Director-General of the ILO from 1948-1970
http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/how-the-ilo-works/ilo-director-general/former-directors-general/WCMS_192712/lang--en/index.htm


The Declaration of Philadelphia (DOP), in which the Allied powers under the leadership of the United States and Great Britain set out the parameters of a peacetime global order, proclaimed the ILO’s intention to dedicate itself to finding measures “to promote the economic and social advancement of the less developed regions of the world.”

Certain Latin American and Asian countries, like the newly independent India, put increasing pressure on the ILO to respond in a concrete way to the stipulation contained in the DOP that poorer independent nations should also be helped in their efforts towards economic and social progress. In this way, the demands of the colonial territories for minimum standards turned into the demands of developing countries for practical assistance. According to the latter’s wishes, the ILO now needed to provide technical expertise and to advise the new nations in a variety of areas, from methods for increasing productivity to social security to occupational health and safety.  The new director-general of ILO appointed in 1948, American David Morse, took up the challenge.  The ILO under his twenty-two–year-long leadership became an international development agency; the term development
became the conceptual basis on which the ILO tried to shape the nation-building processes of its new members.

In his very first year in office, David Morse initiated, with the backing of the United Nations, the process that would lead to the setting up of the ILO’s technical assistance programs.

Within a short period of time, Morse’s successful drive to transform the ILO into an operational organization providing technical assistance in “underdeveloped areas” of the world changed the face of the ILO profoundly. In 1948 only 20 percent of the ILO’s budget had been earmarked for activities other than standard setting; just ten years later technical assistance accounted for around 80
percent. During the first years of the technical assistance activities, the ILO engaged mainly in fields such as vocational training and productivity issues; later on, it extended the scope of its programs gradually. Despite the new emphasis on technical functions, however, the ILO’s “classic” standard-setting work continued to play an important role alongside the new activities. Already in 1949,
Morse claimed that technical assistance had to be seen as complementary to the legislative work of the organization “for it is in fact the other half of the same coin.” He declared the realization of certain core principles and standards such as freedom of association or freedom from discrimination and forced labor not just a goal, but a method of economic progress, claiming that they helped to ease
the consequences of the modernization process and paved the way for lasting development.

The ILO accordingly claimed that its International Labor Code (which contained the entirety of international labor standards adopted by the ILO’s annual conferences) and its DOP presented
a set of solutions that the liberal democracies of Europe and North America had found to the political and economic crises of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism, a powerful range of tools for the promotion of democratic modernization. It seems obvious that Morse’s thinking was rooted in
his  New Deal experience, when he and his collaborators in the NLRB had helped to implement labor legislation as a direct response to the devastating economic and political effects of the Great Depression

Source: daniel maul,“Help Them Move the ILO Way”: The International Labor Organization and the Modernization Discourse in the Era of Decolonization and the Cold War

http://re.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/social%20justice.pdf



For ILO's role in productivity movement specially in developing countries and Europe see
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=ZYdyDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA79#v=onepage&q&f=false

Visit of Vikram Sarabhia team to Japan productivity center
http://www.pib.nic.in/archive/docs/DVD_17/ACC%20NO%20286-BR/EXT-1956-10-11_6007.pdf


Report - Sarabhai team to Japan
http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/1957_9/25/indian_productivity_team_in_japan.pdf

Vikram Sarabhai: A Life
Amrita Shah
Penguin UK, 15-Jun-2016 - Literary Collections - 264 pages
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=vIM_DAAAQBAJ

Productivity and Management of State Level Public Enterprises, Volume 1
Atmanand
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Z4cprW0xCaYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false




2016
ILO is still working with India in the areas of productivity and competitiveness.
http://www.ilo.org/newdelhi/aboutus/WCMS_166809/lang--en/index.htm


Productivity and Social Organization: The Ahmedabad experiment: technical ...
edited by A. K. Rice
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=GR9UAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT35#v=onepage&q&f=false