The director (HR) usually figures way down the pecking order in most public sector companies. But that’s not the case with state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) where it is seen as a top-flight assignment.

 

Dr. A.K. Balyan, who was appointed last week as the managing director and chief executive officer of Petronet LNG, had held the director (HR) post at ONGC for about seven years. He had a reasonably successful stint at the oil behemoth even though there were a couple of prickly industrial relation issues that remained to be sorted out.
With a large human resource pool that spread across the country – from Dehradun to Karaikkal and Mumbai High to the remote North East – ONGC presents challenging situations for the incumbent. Dr. Balyan’s successor will have to be a strategist. In an organisation that has a very large officer cadre, the collective bargaining option has been nixed with the disbanding of the ASTO, the once-powerful association of executives.

 

Recently, we focussed on the prospects of four executive directors who were in the race for the top job. We had said that all four – K.S. Jamestin, Tauquir Hussain, Priti Mathur and J.G. Chaturvedi -were eminently qualified, well connected and that it was a race that would be too close to call. We had also predicted that the outcome might depend on their performance as assessed by either chairman and managing director R.S. Sharma or petroleum minister Murli Deora since there was nobody in the fray from Assam – the state that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh regards as his political home.

 

But we now learn that the field has widened with one more horse in the fray: Shreedhar Vyas, who is by all accounts a formidable opponent. Vyas was the leader of the officers’ association for a long time and had negotiated with the petroleum ministry and with the prime ministers’ office on several occasions. He came in for sharp criticism within the association when he accepted then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s appeal and called off a strike. The charge against him was that he let down the fellow officers by calling off the strike. Vyas countered it by saying that his was the most sensible decision at that point of time, taken in the larger interest of the country and the association. The fact, however, remains that this incident created powerful detractors for Vyas within ONGC.

 

Vyas’ entry queers the pitch for everyone. The big question is whether he will go all the way. That is difficult to predict, considering the fact that he is only a GM while all the others are EDs. But Vyas is extremely well plugged into the political ecosphere and one can’t overlook the fact that he is a GM from Assam.

 

As far as the selectors are concerned, anyone who holds the post of a GM is within the ambit of selection for the post of director (HR).

 

Our understanding is that Vyas’ political influence is limited to the level of cabinet ministers and Chief Ministers. If political bigwigs above those levels get involved in the process of selection which on present reckoning looks a strong possibility, it would be hard to predict who would win the race in what promises to be a needle finish.