Sangh Parivar

And, Gujarat was no different
till a few years ago. Today, however, the Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Limited
(GUVNL) is one of the very few power utilities in the country that boasts of
making a profit.

It is this
rags-to-riches story that the prestigious London Business School (LBS) of the
University of London has
recognised.

A case study on
GUVNL's turnaround, prepared by Dr Rakesh Mohan Joshi, chairperson at the Indian
Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi, has been selected as one among eight
winners in a global competition initiated by the Aditya V Birla India Centre at
LBS.

"The centre had invited
case studies on Indian firms from across the globe and had received 150
entries," Joshi told TOI over the phone from Delhi. Of these, eight case studies
were selected as development initiative winners for 2007. "It was not the
handsome amount that I received but the recognition that was
significant."

Joshi read about
Gujarat government's claim of 100 per cent rural electrification in a newspaper
article and started working on the case study last year . "I found it
interesting that at a time when 55 per cent of our rural populace has no access
to electricity, the Gujarat government claimed to provide electricity to all its
villages."

Apart from showing
how bureaucrats in other state electricity boards could start making profits,
Joshi's study also highlighted the comprehensive strategy used by the Gujarat
government to resolve the dilemma between reformist versus populist
measures.



Joshi highlighted how GUVNL went
from making losses of more than Rs 2,500 crore in 2000-2001 to making a
significant profit of Rs 220 crore in 2006-07. The study also stated that
despite being a politically sensitive issue, GUVNL successfully managed to split
into six separate companies from its original identity of Gujarat Electricity
Board and retrained 43,000 of its 50,000
employees.

Some of the other
cases that made it to the list with GUVNL's turnaround were merger of Air India
and Indian Airlines and Reliance Fresh Stores in food retailing.