July 2005
Personality

Sanjay Shah Freelancer by Heart

With the Institute of Environment Management (IEM) now closed down (from July 1), its outgoing Director Sanjay Bahadur Shah is again on the move and he is going to take up a few international freelance assignments. But one may wonder about the closure of the Institute.

The answer is simple. The donors who were supporting the Institute have suspended their help. Nepal did not own the institute. The freshest example of how the lack of local ownership causes an untimely demise of a programme or institution despite its positive contribution to the society.

For a freedom-junkie like Shah with a strong forte in his professional field, the demise of an institution does not make much difference to him, though it does for the nation. He has been offered similar assignments but he has chosen to be a freelance consultant for the time being.

How he landed at the IEM is in itself an interesting story.

Though an Electronic and Telecommunications Engineer plus an MBA by training, he was encouraged to apply for the job by the DANIDA Chief Technical Advisor who was helping in the Environment Sector Programme Support (ESPS) under which one of the components was the IEM. “When he encouraged me to apply for this position at a get-together in the school where we both had our children enrolled, I said I had no idea about the job. The Advisor said it did not matter. The actual work was to be done by the technicians, but the Institute had many other management dimensions for which I could make valuable contributions. So I decided to apply and I was selected for the position after undergoing a competitive recruitment process,” he says.

The core activity of the institute was to impart training related to the ESPS stakeholders (HMGN, Social Partners) and to provide consultancy, mainly to the industrial units. The achievements made in these counts were remarkable. “DANIDA, the Danish donor organisation, had given us a target to carry out 1,200 training programmes over five years, but the number of trainings conducted crossed 3,000. Similarly, another target was to design 30 training courses, the achievement was 66. The expenses were also less compared to what was budgeted,” he informs. More importantly, in the process over 50 specialists have now been developed who are of world class standards and are now an asset for Nepal – especially in the field of urban and industrial environmental management.

Some concrete examples of the achievement included the help provided to Godavari marbles to get the ISO 14000 and the training provided to women to become SAFA tempo drivers.

“Our activities were geared towards environmental management, but at the same time they were also creating employment opportunities,” he points out.

One programme that the institute had started but unfortunately could not repeat was the training for women technical graduates. They were trained on the job at various organisations implementing environment management system as per ISO 14001. “They are employed at various organisations and some of them received scholarship to study abroad due to the training IEM provided,” he says.

Coming from a well off family – his father, Rana Bahadur Shah, was a liquor baron with the exclusive right for liquor sales in various parts of the country – Sanjay Shah had no monetary problems during his childhood and was educated in Lucknow, Darjeeling, New Delhi (where he did his high school and +2) and Bhopal of India (where he did his engineering). But in the process, he was almost always away from home and his family. This made it difficult for him to adjust to the family dynamics when he came back home after completing his education. He joined the biscuit factory set up by his father (Gorkha Biscuit Factory) as the Operational Director. The family pressured him to get married though he thought he was still not ready. “And I don’t know exactly why but I could not explain this to my family members. Maybe the long detachment from the family was behind it which made it difficult for me to communicate properly,” is his assessment now.

So to get away from this pressure he started applying for enrolment in the MBA course in several universities. Finally, he enrolled himself in an MBA course at the University of Dallas, USA. Then he broke the news to the family and flew away. It is one of the best things he ever did in his life, according to him, as it opened his eyes and his perception of the world – and was a key aspect in his overall development.

However, even after staying in the USA for four years and despite the good opportunities that were available in the US, Shah decided to come back home.

“I didn’t find social richness there,” is his explanation.

When he came home, Gorkha Biscuit was closed down while Seti Cigarette Factory was being privatised and his family was preparing to bid for it. At the same time, his family had also invested in the Bank of Kathmandu as its one of the promoters.

So fresh with a MBA, Shah had the option of joining either of these two companies. As BOK started the operation first (Seti Cigarettes started two years after that), he decided to go to BOK as a special assistant to the then Thai General Manager (from Siam Commercial Bank) and later was made the Head of Personnel & Administration. He also served in various other increasingly senior positions within the bank.

During his stay at BOK, the Thai joint venture partner in the bank, Siam Commercial Bank, left the partnership. People say that the Nepali promoters drove the Thais away. “Yes, you may say that we drove them away, but it is equally true that though Siam is a very good commercial bank, it treated Nepal’s bankers as more backward than those of Cambodia. The personnel supplied by Siam to BOK were worse than the branch managers BOK had,” explains Shah. “It was a classic case of an international joint venture that went wrong – and I had a centre court seat to see the dynamics of cross cultural management issues that I could only dream of,” he says.

His stay at BOK brought about a decisive change in his personal life. Internet had just arrived in Nepal and he started communicating with friends from the MBA days. One such friend was Janne, a Dane who was then working in London. She invited him to London, he accepted the invitation and before coming back he invited her to Nepal. While guiding her around in Nepal, they decided to get married and Shah broke that news to the family who, as could be expected from a traditional family, did not approve of him getting married to a foreigner. Then he went to France to meet Janne’s parents (they are retired in France) and got their consent to a court marriage in Nepal. The process was very complex and took more than the normal time it takes to get a marriage registered. Anyway, the couple got married after a long wait, but then Shah decided to distance himself from his family. “I was not financially prepared for it as I had thought I was not doing anything bad and had not figured out the possibility of such developments. But I was emotionally tortured and wanted to put an end to it by distancing myself from all my family ties,” he recounts.

Meanwhile, he also left BOK and started concentrating on his freelance consulting work. Why did he leave BOK? “Because, I found that no matter how qualified you are, people treat you as the son of the promoter. It was time to prove myself and my capabilities beyond my family links and platform, which I always knew I had. More than anything or anyone else, it was to prove myself to “myself” outside the “umbrella of my family linkage.”

As Janne had a degree in hotel management too, she joined a hotel in Kathmandu, but left it soon as she felt there was no professionalism in the company. Then she started teaching corporate finance in Kathmandu University, which she did for a semester before she got pregnant with their first child – their daughter Sofia. Meanwhile, Shah himself was beginning to do well and was freelancing for bilateral and multilateral agencies.

For six years, the couple struggled with the various social dynamics of living in Nepal and not being recognised as a couple by his own parents. It took his parents six long years to accept them and their marriage. “In this process, I got a very good understanding of the whole social dynamics of Nepal,” says Shah.

It was then that the IEM offer came around and he joined it.

Before IEM, the industrialists in Nepal used to run away when anyone talked about the environment. “That was because they thought environment issues were only about increasing expenses from which there were no pay-backs. They were looking at it from the traditional approach. Modern environmental management is process-based. Earlier they used to look at it only at the end point. We should look also at what happened before. Once people started adopting the modern approach, they started applying all the processes in environment management and saw that it actually helps to save costs,” he explains.

The method followed by IEM was to guarantee the industrialist that IEM would be able to save at least five times the fee paid if he let the IEM devise a proper environment management system in his industry. “We promised that we would not charge any fee if we failed to fulfil our guarantee. But in reality we did not have to return any fee,” says Shah.

What is the saving in average that can be expected from environment management methods? “By the thumb rule it is 4 percent of the turnover in average. But in the Nepali industries you can expect it to be as much as 10 percent because of the very poor concern shown towards resource utilisation. Resource utilisation in Nepali enterprises is still one of the worst in the SAARC region. It is rather pathetic!”

He gives an example of a steel mill near Birgunj where Rs. 4 million per month was saved just by adjusting the heat in the furnace. The saving was not only in terms of the energy bill but also in terms of the wastage of the material due to overheating. Similarly, in a brewery, IEM found 9 percent loss in the bottling unit alone, which was reduced after proper measures were adopted.

His advice is: the industrialist should know how many units of energy are being consumed in their plant per unit of the product produced and sold. The smaller the figure, the better. “One does not need any other information as a start to getting into matters of product efficiency, as energy is a primary input material against which all processes can be benchmarked. We can help just on the basis of that figure. This will make tremendous impact not only on the profits but also on the environment as one of the main environmental problems is a problem of excess use of energy and of material wastage in the production process.”

Then, does Shah think of himself as a corporate guy or an NGO guy? “I rather like to call myself a change agent,” is the reply. “I try to bring about an attitudinal change. The problem in Nepal in my experience is not so much the lack of intelligence – intelligence we have plenty of. The problem as I see it is the application of that intelligence or, if I may say so, the application of common sense. However, I would like to stay within the development sector. There is a lot to do in the development field to take Nepal to the status of a developed country, as the beauty is that a development worker can see tremendous result from his little work as our base is so small.”

However, he does not like to take up any full time employment for the moment. “I would like to continue as a freelancer because currently I don’t want to work under a boss. I like to be my own boss. I would like to work in a field that helps the private sector’s involvement in development. It is in the benefit of the private sector if Nepal develops. The donors are helping us a lot, but the ownership of these activities is still not with the Nepalis. The donors cannot provide the solutions to our problems; they can only provide the technical competencies. The solutions must be localised and implemented locally.”