The Development of Human Resources in India

India is Amaz­ing and Complicated  

I vis­ited India in 2007 on a busi­ness trip.  I went to 5 cities in 7 days.  The sites were over­whelm­ing and aston­ish­ing.  The cities filled with riches and poverty.  Very few places that I have trav­eled have impacted me so much imme­di­ately upon arrival, or left such a last­ing impres­sion.  I hope to go back some­day and spend more time there.  Since that isn’t in this year’s travel bud­get, I try to stay con­nected to the coun­try by uti­liz­ing social media to build con­nec­tions over there.  My wife still does busi­ness with a few peo­ple  there, and I have many con­nec­tions through LinkedIn and my blog.

It is through one of those con­nec­tions that I bring you today’s post.

I am happy to post another post as part of the “Over There” series of guest blog­gers I am try­ing to present.  This week, we travel to India to hear from busi­ness con­sul­tant and blog­ger, Gau­tam Ghosh who brings us a some his­tory on the devel­op­ment of the HR func­tion in India.

Human Resources in India

HR in India is a com­par­a­tively new func­tion – in fact, the free cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket in India is a com­par­a­tively new idea.

It may be tough to imag­ine, but cap­i­tal­ism was seen as a vehi­cle of oppres­sion by Indian free­dom fight­ers. That’s because colo­nial­ism arrived in India under the guise of a trad­ing firm – The East India Com­pany.

That is why India’s free­dom lead­ers embraced social­ism and gov­ern­ment owned enter­prises were the orga­ni­za­tions that thrived between 1950 and 1990.

How­ever there were some large pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions which had existed from the 19^th cen­tury which were Indian owned – tra­di­tional trad­ing houses that had ven­tured into man­u­fac­tur­ing and mar­ket­ing goods. One of them par­tic­u­larly, the Tata group (http://www.tata.com ) was a pio­neer in peo­ple man­age­ment prin­ci­ples. The Tatas looked after their employ­ees, often build­ing civic ameni­ties where their Steel and Motor plants existed.

Even­tu­ally with the dawn of com­pet­i­tive­ness in the 1990s – such pater­nal­is­tic mea­sures had to be cut back, but yet the human hand of such firms is quite visible.

How­ever, it was the Pub­lic Sec­tor Units (PSUs) which in the 1970s explored cut­ting edge OD con­cepts start­ing with T-Groups and Orga­ni­za­tional Change ini­tia­tives – dri­ven by HR thinkers like Udai Pareek, TV Rao and oth­ers. In fact, Dr. Pareek was one of the first peo­ple to be cer­ti­fied as a facil­i­ta­tor by the NTL of the US. As he writes (http://www.isabs.org/mem4.shtml) some of the OD stal­warts from the US —  like Doulas McGre­gor, War­ren Ben­nis and oth­ers were involved in the devel­op­ment of HR and OD as a dis­ci­pline in India.

Post 1991 when lib­er­al­iza­tion took place – lib­er­al­iza­tion being the word for open­ing up the pro­tected econ­omy and let­ting exter­nal busi­nesses come in that busi­nesses and along with it HR really took off.

New Indian orga­ni­za­tions started in the 1970s and 1980s sud­denly took flight, par­tic­u­larly in the area of IT and the new busi­ness of Busi­ness Process Out­sourc­ing. Old MNCs like IBM and Coca Cola (which had been kicked out by an extremely social­ist gov­ern­ment in the late 1970s) came back to the coun­try – and along with them came the blue chip Invest­ment Bank­ing and Man­age­ment Con­sult­ing firms.

When the times boomed India faced a per­pet­ual tal­ent crunch, the same tal­ent being vied for by dif­fer­ent indus­tries – young, Eng­lish speak­ing – they wanted to mould that tal­ent to meet their needs and money (as usu­ally hap­pens) became the dif­fer­en­tia­tor for peo­ple to join – along with the promise of heady growth.

HR today in India stands at a cross roads – pri­mar­ily dri­ven by the HR tal­ent short­age – which is caused by very few good insti­tutes offer­ing HR edu­ca­tion (http://www.gautamblogs.com/2007/08/hr-talent-shortage.html)

Larger MNC and large Indian firms can afford and pay for highly tal­ented HR pro­fes­sion­als – and HR salaries are climb­ing to new high levels

How­ever there is a huge mar­ket in the Small and Medium sized enter­prises whose growth is being ham­pered because of crit­i­cal HR competencies/ tal­ent missing

Some orga­ni­za­tions are look­ing at build­ing their own HR tal­ent pools – spe­cially those with a huge inter­nal recruit­ing work­force, since in India for an under­grad recruit­ing is easy to start a HR career – and in look­ing to get higher level man­agers from other func­tions (like the CFO http://www.gautamblogs.com/2006/04/mohandas-pai-takes-over-as-infosyss-hr_26.html !) to head HR

So if you’re an HR pro­fes­sional look­ing at your next career chal­lenge– why don’t you head to India? We’re still grow­ing at around 6% of GDP  J and some indus­tries are still clock­ing dou­ble digit growth!

About the Blog­ger  — Gau­tam Ghosh

Gau­tam Ghosh is a HR con­sul­tant and social media geek. He blogs at http://www.gautamblogs.com and you can fol­low him on Twit­ter http://twitter.com/gautamghosh and Face­book http://www.facebook.com/HR.Blogger

Before turn­ing a con­sul­tant he’s worked in var­i­ous Learn­ing & Devel­op­ment and OD roles in orga­ni­za­tions like Hewlett Packard, Dell and Deloitte in India.

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Tagged as: Gautam Ghosh, HR, Human Resources, India