Book review : TN's embedded potential springs to life on new canvas

Chennai: Economic growth, unlike aesthetics, does not merely lie in the eyes of the beholder. There are always objective correlates that may still fall short of a full-fledged validation of the conclusions.

But Indian epistemologists, particularly the ‘Mimamsa’ and ‘Vedanta’ on the one hand, and the ‘Nyaya’ school of logic on the other hand, tend to take two quite radically different views on what ‘validates’ human cognitions.

The first group speaks of ‘cognitions’ as ‘self-validating’ or a ‘self-certifying process’-, for example the ‘truth’ of one’s existence is validated by one’s own self awareness or self-consciousness. But the ‘Nayayikas’ would insist just on its opposite – ‘external certification’ like the ‘birth certificate’ from the Municipal body of one’s birth place.

The beauty in Indian epistemological systems, as scholars explain, is that no cognition is absolutely wrong. Perceptions may be partial, ill informed or worse be plain confused.

This is what appears to have made the task of the veteran business journalist, Ms Sushila Ravindranath, in her latest publication, ‘Surge – Tamil Nadu’s Growth Story’, all the more difficult.

Unbundling the economic growth story spanning some 65 years of a southern state like Tamil Nadu, is in the author’s own words, “an attempt at telling the story of a state which has chosen to hide its light under the bushel.” If one applies the ‘self-validation’ criterion, ‘light’ will always remain ‘light’, but by the ‘Nyaya’ criterion, only a big brush can lift the bushel to show us the ‘light’. And as a very well informed, discerning and clinically observant writer that the author is known to be in journalistic circles of Chennai, she has gone about delineating this task in as objective a manner as possible.

There are several strands to this big historical story. However, Sushila has unfolded the developments largely from the perspective of corporate enterprises, their promoters, movers and shakers and the new generation of entrepreneurs that the post-1990s’ economic liberalization process in India has unleashed.
Truly, the policies and programmes that put Tamil Nadu on a sound path of industrial development in the early 1960s’, were thanks to former Chief Minister K.Kamaraj, his genial industries minister and late President of India, R.Venkatraman, other forward-looking leaders like late C.Subramaniam and a very dedicated team of IAS officers who have been carrying the burden even now. The author has also rightly dispelled misconceptions that the subsequent DMK and AIADMK regimes have been regressive.

Politics apart, Tamil Nadu’s corporate theatre has historically witnessed a good mix of the conservative businessmen rooted to family values and traditions, the ‘old money’ as the author titles the section on well established groups over the decades like the Murugappa group, Amalgamations, TVS group, MRF, India Cements (despite N Srinivasan’s later forays into other more daring enterprises), Sanmar, Rane, Ramco and some of the Coimbatore-based groups like LMW, PSG group, Elgi and Sakthi group to a new generation of entrepreneurs. All of the latter may not be chip of the old bloc but yet have been very resourceful and to run job-creating, value-adding and modestly profitable enterprises.

In portraying the ups and downs of these groups, Sushila has well documented the crises each went through and how they ‘re-invented’ themselves, besides sharing with readers sociological insights into how industries have driven the state’s larger economic growth. For instance, she writes, “Sanmar’s joint venture model is unique in the country,” and how even till the 1970s’, “elders in the older business families did not approve of offshore deals.” But a lot has changed since then, when Suresh Krishna of Sundaram Fasteners of TVS group began to passionately talk of exports, and how he was on cloud nine when his company won the prestigious General Motor’s order to be sole supplier of radiator caps. Yet, most Tamil Nadu businessmen would not want to do a Prometheus.

The failures and some of the fiascos have also been dramatically captured in a racy journalistic style by the author – whether it was the SPIC disinvestments row that left A.C. Muthiah shattered at one point of time, the ‘mysterious’ lone-ranger P. Rajarathinam who went on a wild acquisition spree in the early 1990s’, or the new cosmic dancer on the computers and telecom scene, C.Sivasankaran.

The singular determination with which the Chief Minister J.Jayalalithaa and her team of officers managed to bring ‘Ford’ to Chennai that later triggered a huge wave of investments in the state’s automotive sector, the TCS story that played a silent, yet big part in heralding the ‘new economy’ of Tamil Nadu, the matrix of motivation and entrepreneurial drive in the industrial clusters of Coimbatore, Tirupur (garments and knitwear), besides the ‘retail revolution’ of late have all been quite extensively dealt with.

In a state bugged by informational opacity for long years, Sushila Ravindranath’s work — despite other aspects like the public sector’s crucial role in catalysing private sector growth finding brief mentions — comes both as an eye-opener and as a whiff of fresh air without being sensational.