“Never give up, and be confident in what you do. There may be tough times, but the difficulties which you face will make you more determined to achieve your objectives and to win against all the odds.”
― Marta
It was a cloudy day in the October of 2016. My college was hustling with enthusiasm as everyone was busy preparing for Aavartan, the technical festival of my college. I was the head coordinator of the Robotics Club of my college. My friends and I had created this club in January of 2016 and this moment was very special for us as it was the first time, we were organizing a couple of events in the college. It was a big deal because for the past 10 months our team had worked very hard to build this club and recruit the smartest people on campus to organize large scale Robotics events. All this required fund collection, event planning and marketing management. Finally, it was our day to make the final preparations and shine tomorrow.
I was in charge of
“Terrain Trader”, which was among the biggest events of Aavartan. In order to win, the team’s robot had to pass through a complicated arena containing challenging terrains. I had big plans for this event and had designed the arena from scratch. The arena required a lot of manual labor & time to be created on ground. It was also a very complicated design and had to be created on the exact spot where the competition was to be organized as carrying it around would have damaged it. Also, we were working with thin ply wood and hence it was important that all water/moisture be shunned or else the ply would be ruined. My team started working at around 11 am in the morning and the plan for the day was jam packed. However, the most beautiful thing happened that day. It rained for hours at stretch, starting 12 pm. This for us meant that we couldn’t work and an extra hour will be spent in cleaning and drying the area. Also, no carpenters were available for the woodwork and no workers were available for the iron work that we had thought of incorporating in the design post rains. But the stakes were high. If this event would have gotten cancelled, my team would have faced heavy embarrassment, both online and offline, as teams from all over the state were participating.
It was 5 pm in the evening when the rain stopped. I immediately called a meeting and tried to charge my team with enthusiasm. I urged them to go the extra mile and laid out the plan to be followed for the project to be completed. The project would have taken 5 hours to complete if we would have had support from the carpenters and iron workers. Without their support it took us close to 8 hours to complete the activity and wrap up. Another hardship that we, as a team, had to face was that the in-time for the girls’ hostel of my college was 7 o’clock in the evening which meant that the team as a whole could work together only for an hour after rains. It required painstaking efforts from the team as first of all, the equipment had to be fetched. Then, the few people who knew how to operate them had to teach a few others the same, so that the work could be divided efficiently. Lastly, everyone had to stretch their schedules as from a team of 12 members, in the morning, we had dropped down to only 7. It was around 2:30 that we were able to wrap up and the structure was complete. Thankfully, the event turned out to be a great success and the Robotics Club became wildly popular in our college. Today it is one of the most prestigious clubs of NIT Raipur.
That day I learned the value of team building. None of the juniors that worked in our team worked out of fear or pressure. They worked because of the passion we ignited in them. I learned that when it comes to extreme situations, the only thing that can work for a team is the culture that it propagates. This experience added a lot of value to my character and to this day I try to imbibe the learning that I received from the project into my work.
Why Aditya Birla Group Is Big In my life?
Aditya Birla Group is among the biggest conglomerates in the world today. The group has truly taken India on a global scale with operations in more than 35 countries and an employee headcount of 1,20,000. In fashion, the group has over 4000+ department stores and 2500+ brand outlets all over India. It also operates 5000+ free medical camps every year and provides free education to more than 20,000 children every year.
The group has a massive scale and every Indian comes in contact with the group in one way of the other. However, for me Aditya Birla Group is much more than a conglomerate. It gave me my role model in the form of Aditya Vikram Birla.
I love reading books but I never used to read non-fiction thinking that they are boring and dull. However, the first non-fiction that I picked up was a book named
“India Unbound” by Gurcharan Das. It was then that I learned of Aditya Birla and the challenges he overcame to become the man that he was. Aditya Birla was a man of simplicity and excellence. He was known as the “human factory-making factory” for the breath-taking speed with which he used to build industries and expand them internationally.
However, the challenges he faced during his lifetime while he tried to establish his business were galore. He did Chemical Engineering from MIT. When he came back to India and forayed into the world of business, the government policies and systems put in place to establish industries were particularly hostile. It began with the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act of 1951, which required an entrepreneur to get a license to set up a new unit, to expand it, or change the product mix. The purpose of licensing was (a) to create the planned pattern of investment, (b) to counteract monopoly and the concentration of wealth, (c) to maintain regional balance in locating industries, (d) to protect the interests of small-scale producers and encourage the entry of new entrepreneurs, and (e) to encourage optimum scale of plants and advanced technology. All these were good intentions, but the way that the bureaucracy went about administrating the licensing system created a nightmare for an entrepreneur.
The licensing was done by an untrained army of underpaid, third-rate engineers at the Directorate General of Technical Development, operating on the basis of inadequate and ill-organized information and without clear- cut criteria, vetted thousands of applications on an ad hoc basis. The low-level functionaries took months in the futile micro review of an application and finally sent it for approval to the administrative ministry. The ministry again lost months reviewing the same data before it sent the application to an inter-ministerial licensing committee of senior bureaucrats, who were equally ignorant of entrepreneurial realities, and who also operated upon ad hoc criteria in the absence of well-ordered priorities. Once it cleared the licensing committee, it was sent to the minister for final approval. After the minister’s approval, the investor had to seek approval for the import of machinery from the capital goods licensing committee. If a foreign collaboration was involved, an inter-ministerial foreign agreements committee also had to give its consent. If finance was needed from a state financial institution, the same scrutiny had to be repeated afresh. The result was enormous delays, sometimes lasting years, with staggering opportunities for corruption. By the time the backbreaking process of moving files from office to office was completed, many an entrepreneur had lost heart.
Despite all of this, Aditya Birla built seventy factories in his lifetime! By the early 1980s, he had built an empire of a dozen companies in the Far East, which had become global leaders in the manufacture of viscose staple fiber, palm oil, textiles, and carbon black. In India, his group became the largest producer of rayon filament yarn, flax yarn, caustic soda, rayon grade pulp, and aluminium (in the private sector), and among the top three makers of cement. When he died suddenly in 1995, his group had thirty-seven companies with sales close to $5 billion and after-tax profits of $450 million. More than a third of his business was overseas. At the time of his early death he was completing an oil refinery, a copper smelter, a hot-rolled coil steel mill. He was planning a petrochemical complex, a 1,000-megawatt power station, and an entry into telecommunications.
His story taught me how to fight against all odds and to this day whenever I think of his achievements, I get filled with motivation and enthusiasm. In his personal life he was a shy and reserved person. But behind that exterior was a visionary who developed Aditya Birla Group into the mammoth that it is today. Finally, I would like to end this article with the advice G.D. Birla gave to Aditya Birla at MIT which perhaps captures the reason for his simplicity –
“Eat only vegetarian food, never drink alcohol or smoke, keep early hours, marry young, switch off lights when leaving the room, cultivate regular habits, go for a walk every day, keep in touch with the family, and above all, don’t be extravagant.”