By the 1920s, the first multinationals had arrived in India. Nestle had been selling condensed milk through agents in Bombay and Calcutta since 1912, Siemens set up its India unit in 1922, and Bata opened its first stores in 1926 before starting production in Konnagar in 1931. Meanwhile, Lever Brothers was already planning a manufacturing presence in 1923.
Yet it took until 1961 for Unilever to appoint its first Indian chairman, Prakash Tandon, nearly two decades after it had first begun inducting Indians into its managerial ranks.
That tells us as much about Unilever as it does about India: there were simply too few Indians trained to run large, modern enterprises. Among those who saw this most clearly, and set about correcting it, was Ravi Matthai, the first full-time director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
The early gap
Matthai was born in Calicut in 1927, the youngest child of a Syrian Christian family for whom education was all-important. His father, John Matthai, was a celebrated economist who had taught at Madras University and sat on Tata group boards before joining Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet, first as Railway Minister and then as Finance Minister.
Not surprisingly, Ravi went to the Doon School, then Allahabad University, followed by Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He returned to a rather more prosaic job with MacNeill & Barry, a Calcutta managing agency. It was a humdrum job hardly suited to a man of his abilities.
Thankfully, in 1963 he joined the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, as professor of marketing. Two years later, Vikram Sarabhai, who had cofounded IIM Ahmedabad, persuaded Matthai, all of 38 and without an advanced degree, to take over as its first full-time director.
Brick by brick
What followed was six years of unglamorous institution-building. To Matthai, the institute’s purpose was the application of knowledge, which meant every faculty member had to teach, research and consult, without the option of choosing just one.
Faculty recruitment was his obsession. Reasoning that poaching from other Indian institutions only shuffled the same small pool, he flew to the US in May 1967, interviewed 65 candidates himself and made 18 offers. It was a trip he repeated for the next three years.
T.T. Ram Mohan writes in his account of Matthai’s tenure, Brick by Red Brick: Ravi Matthai and the Making of IIM Ahmedabad, that one of these trips brought the celebrated management guru C.K. Prahalad to IIMA in 1971.
In January 1972, six years into the job, Matthai announced he was stepping down so that fresh minds could take over.
Into villages
Still on the faculty but restless, he turned from building an institution to testing a theory in the field.
In 1975, he picked Jawaja, a drought-prone, officially hopeless block of some 200 villages in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, and launched what he called the Rural University.
It had no classrooms or faculty-student hierarchy, just teams from IIM Ahmedabad and the National Institute of Design working alongside local weavers and leather workers to rebuild their skills and markets from the ground up.
It worked well enough that Jawaja’s craft cooperatives were still selling to international buyers such as Oxfam decades later. Matthai wrote up the experiment in The Rural University: The Jawaja Experiment in Educational Innovation, published posthumously in 1985.
A larger mission
Jawaja convinced Matthai that rural India needed managers of its own, an idea his cousin Verghese Kurien, architect of India’s dairy cooperative movement, was already living out at Anand.
In 1979, the two of them, alongside IIM (A) colleagues Kamla Chowdhry and Michael Halse, set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), in the same town where Kurien had built Amul and the National Dairy Development Board.
Away from work, colleagues remember Matthai as a spare, undramatic man of few words: a heavy smoker who once settled an official dinner bill from his own chequebook rather than charge it to the institute.
Matthai died in London in February 1984, aged 56, following bypass surgery. His life was spent building institutions that remain the pride of India more than half a century later.
The scale of his achievement, and that of his peers, is all around us. IIMA and IRMA belong to a remarkable generation of organisations that include Homi Bhabha’s atomic energy establishment, Sarabhai’s space programme, Kurien’s dairy cooperatives, and the early IITs and AIIMS.
All of them were raised within the first fifteen years of independence, when India had precious few resources but no shortage of leaders willing to build lasting institutions with whatever they had.
For more such stories, read The Enterprising Indian: Stories From India Inc.