A.K. Garg, Chairman and Managing Director (CMD), Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), is focusing on reducing the company’s considerable debt…

Some of A.K. Garg’s most memorable assignments demonstrate the tenacity and commitment he has shown throughout his distinguished career. In one, he was in charge of procurement at Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) for more than three years when he had never handled procurement, a high-stakes responsibility. Three high-value tenders came his way and, never having been good at accounting, he found the job challenging.

“Had I faulted or faltered in handling the assignment, it would have meant a big setback. But I managed. Then, when I was in charge of Allahabad, I was the youngest officer – 35 – to head a district, and it was a tough district. Kolkata was again a difficult posting, as I had to handle a staff of more than 10,000,” he says.

An electronics and communications engineer, Garg graduated from the University of Roorkee in 1975 and went on to do his master’s there too, in communications systems. In 1977, he joined the engineering services of the Indian Telecommunications Service. He went on to serve in various capacities in the Department of Telecommunications and BSNL for the next 35 years.

Having headed various telecom circles, including Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Benares, Allahabad, Dehradun, Kolkata, Delhi and Noida, his focus now as CMD of MTNL – his first assignment with the company – is to make it profitable in the next two years. “We are in debt. After paying Rs 105 billion as licence fee for broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum and 3G licences, we have an interest burden of about Rs 12 billion per annum. The challenge is to bring back the old glory to the company,” he says.

His task is not made easier by the fact that he doesn’t see the sector earning more in the future than what it is today, given that a dozen or so telecom operators are in a state of hypercompetition. He thinks that consolidation will take place but it will take time. The National Telecom Policy, 2012 aims to encourage consolidation, he says. Though merger and acquisition norms are yet to be put in place, he believes some consolidation will definitely happen in the long term.

During the span of his career, Garg has come away from every assignment enriched from his interactions with different people, situations and work cultures. He encountered different work habits in every city and district. “For example, Allahabad is more unionised compared to other places, so there was a lot of learning in terms of handling human resources. Kolkata also had a strong union culture but it may not be so relevant in today’s atmosphere. In comparison, Noida was very progressive, bereft of union issues. In fact, it was while serving in Noida that we managed to clock up revenues of Rs 1.4 billion, the highest so far,” he recalls.

Garg has always found a solution to the problems he has faced. For unpunctual employees among the 300,000 staff in Kolkata, for instance, he introduced a web-based attendance system which, to a large extent, succeeded in encouraging employees to follow office timings with greater accountability.

At Dehradun and Noida, he undertook several customer-friendly initiatives which were new at that time. “We used to have a reconnection fee of Rs 100 when the phone was disconnected and many phones were not restored, even after paying the bills. Customers had to submit a separate slip with Rs 100, which people used to often forget to do, thereby failing to get a reconnection. We waived this fee,” he says.

He also started collection boxes where people could drop their bills, and held rural melas, which he called “open sessions”, where officers would settle customers’ issues on the spot.

As he moved around the country in different postings, Garg and his family enjoyed experiencing regional differences. They liked Gujarat for the emphasis on family and people’s awareness of their rights, something on which they are not prepared to compromise. He compares Gujarat with Uttar Pradesh, saying that in Gujarat, BSNL has to address customers’ concerns immediately, even if their phone has been faulty for just two days; in Uttar Pradesh, even if a phone has been out of order for a week, customers are grateful that the service is restored.

Garg relies on a management style that involves everybody in the decision-making process. He has a knack for winning people’s trust and says that, while some of his colleagues and friends may consider this a bit of a “weakness” and a sign of his being too “soft”, it has worked for him in that no one has ever betrayed his trust so far.

“I delegate and review work. I do not interfere in the day-to-day job of my team. I only step in when something is not moving and then, I try and find a solution. I have learnt not to push against the wind and not fuss about things too much. There is a saying that ‘success is never ending and failure is never final’. I believe in this. Abraham Lincoln failed several times but succeeded finally in becoming president of the United States,” he says.

Garg’s childhood in Meerut was marred by the death of his father when he was about two. His mother took up a teaching job to raise him and his two sisters, and moved the family to his maternal grandfather’s home. Sometimes, the early death of a parent can induce a huge sense of responsibility in a child, but not so with Garg, who continued to be carefree as a young boy and spent all day playing marbles, gulli-danda, cricket and football, with studies taking a back seat.

“I always used to get a second division in high school. I also dropped a year in my intermediate year, but I began to take things more seriously after that. I managed to bag a single-digit rank while applying to Roorkee and in the central engineering services exam, too, I scored well. I was ranked fifth or sixth across India,” he says.

He became serious about studying when his performance dipped at the intermediate level. Garg’s mother and grandfather wanted him to register for a diploma course. He did not wish to do so and convinced them to give him a year to improve his grades. He began to focus and raised his grades. “This never-give-up spirit still guides everything I do. One should tackle each task with enthusiasm,” he says.

Garg had no concrete ambitions when he was young. But he had a firm view of how he wanted to achieve success – through honesty, with no short cuts. “There is a saying that the whole world will conspire to help you to achieve what you truly desire. Just work hard for what you wish to achieve,” he says. “Also, I believe that you have to pay back more than what you get as your remuneration. This applies to work as well as relationships. You have to give more than what you get.”

Garg says that not many people realise that if you advertise for a Class IV post, there will be a lot more competition than if you advertise for a higher post, because most people believe in taking short cuts to success and in the process, they get weeded out. “One is not promoted immediately in a government organisation; the process happens step by step. Unless you are ethical, you are likely to be weeded out at some stage or the other,” he says.

In his spare time, Garg loves walking. His routine is fixed: prayers, eight hours’ sleep at night and reading self-help books (he avoids newspapers and television in favour of resting and reading self-help books, although he concedes that they all say pretty much the same thing, in different ways, about inspiration and motivation). At weekends, he likes to have long chats with his son and daughter, who are both married and live abroad, his daughter in Geneva and his son, who he says has been a friend to him for several years, in Singapore.

So, what does he plan to do post- retirement two years hence? “I have really not planned anything. I have left it to God who has blessed me. I have not been successful simply because I was smarter, more competitive or more qualified. I was blessed. I believe destiny is predetermined. God wants to take you in a particular direction and therefore influences your decision to say yes or no to things that come your way,” he says.

But for the next two years, he has plenty to keep him busy. Apart from restructuring MTNL’s debt, he has to address many issues – pensions, voluntary retirement schemes, and surrendering BWA licences because he does not think that the company can earn enough money to equal the licence fee it has paid.