It’s a great time to be an educated middle-class person in India - Mohandas Pai

The amazing transformation in the country’s job sector has only just begun, says Infosys’ Mohandas Pai.

GRN Somashekar

Welcome change: T.V. Mohandas Pai, HR chief of Infosys, says it’s a great time to be an educated middle-class person in today’s India.

Rasheeda Bhagat

He may have started his career in Infosys Technologies in 1994 in finance but, today, as a director on the Board and chief of HR, T.V. Mohandas Pai is all passion and excitement on the HR scene in India, where he sees HR as “the biggest challenge in the next 20 years. We have to invest in people, pay them well and respect them,” he says. Spelling out the amazing transformation on the job front in India in recent years, and the role played by the private sector in this, he says that when he qualified as a CA in 1982, “I had 12 job offers, all from the public sector, except for one. In the private sector, more than talent, jobs went by relationships, as we had a very feudal business culture. But the public sector took the brightest people. Till the last decade it was the one that respected the educated middle-class with no credentials… who didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into a good private company because it worked in very feudal and family oriented ways. But now the balance has shifted and it’s a great time to be an educated middle-class person in India, and the IT industry has created this. It has sent a message to parents: Invest in a child and pay good fees, because he/she will get a good salary.”

Pai was born in Bangalore in a lower middle-class family; his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was raised in an orphanage. The child was sent to a Bangalore school; “in those days you had to be first in class, and get 100 marks in mathematics.”

So did he manage it?

“Oh yes, it was not negotiable,” recalls Pai, seated in his spacious room at the sprawling green Infosys campus in Bangalore. As a child he was fascinated by books and continues to be a voracious reader — “name me a book and chances are I would have read it”. His holidays were spent in the public library where his mother had a membership and he devoured the books there “from Victor Hugo to the Grimm brothers.”

He did his CA and law together; “I wanted to be independent. I didn’t want to work for anybody; I was a rebel.” In 1982 he started practice as a CA in his friend’s office, did consultancy for Prakash Roadlines group from 1986, and later joined them as Executive Director, and remained there till he joined Infosys in 1994.

Even today Pai is visibly excited as he describes how he joined the IT giant. A friend in Enam Securities that handled the Infosys IPO suggested he buy some shares through private placement in 1992 “and I bought 1,500-2,000 shares at Rs 85.” Later he attended the investor conference held by the company before the IPO, along with a friend. “Murthy and Nandan (Nilekani) were making presentations and I told my friend to ask a lot of questions on the prospectus. Those days I had a collection of 3,000 reports; I used to have annual reports for breakfast, would go to AGMs, hound the management and ask a lot of questions. I was a bit of a shareholder activist,” he says.

He had invested in ACC, Kothari Sugars, Tata Steel and Bangalore Leasing, “though I didn’t make much money in equity!” He attended the AGM after the IPO at West End Hotel where all the six founders were there in suits, with three stenographers taking notes. “I asked them ‘why are you paying yourselves so little…?’ they were getting Rs 12,000 or so. I said ‘you should pay yourselves more, you’re making good money and you should respect talent’.” He also asked them why they were paying their auditors less!

After that he was in touch with Nilekani and at subsequent analyst meets too he posed questions on why Infosys was holding so much cash. “Then Nandan met me for lunch in December 1993, and said ‘we have a vacancy; will you join?’ I said ‘I’ll only join if you give me a senior position, but not as an employee, only a consultant’. He said ‘okay, come on board’.”

Murthy, the finance manager

So he joined in February 1994, and worked on several projects such as a private placement, ESOPs, annual report and so on. Pai is effusive in his praise of Murthy’s financial skills. “He was working on a financial model for Infosys, and working with him was a fascinating experience. Here was this man using a software... spreadsheet, et al. Actually he had prepared a financial model — he did 98 per cent of the work, my contribution was only 2 per cent — to forecast Infosys’s growth, and it’s a model that we use even today. He’s an unbelievable man; he’s probably the best finance manager this country has seen. His understanding of finance, the fundamentals, is unbelievable... he’s simply brilliant.”

They worked on this model together and, one day in 1995, “Murthy came to my room and said ‘why don’t you join us?’” G.R. Naik was retiring as head of finance, and “he told me I should take his place. So I joined as Vice President, Finance, and the rest has been a dream run!”

On why he shifted from Finance to HR in 2005, Pai says, “It was a great journey in finance. The most important thing we did in finance was to set standards in financial reporting, corporate governance, transparency, quality of work, engaging government on policy issues, the ADR, etc. While doing all this I worked very hard to create a team of finance people.”

In April 2005 he told Murthy he wanted to step down as CFO, telling him: “I’ve done all this for 12 years and enjoyed every bit. But if I hang on too much, I will not allow my people their day in the sun, and won’t be true to myself or Infosys because a leader is supposed to create new leaders. If I hang on, they’ll get frustrated and that’s not right. So he said ‘why don’t you become Director, Finance and Bala can become CFO’ and I said that means he reports to me again, so what has changed. I should step away.”

Reluctantly, adds Pai, Murthy agreed, and the change was effected in May 2006. When asked what he’d do next “I told Murthy I’ll do some finance stuff, administration, and fade away. And he said: ‘No, handle HR. I know you’ll do it very well.” Around that time Hema (Ravichandran) wanted to go, and Pai stepped in, but as a director for governance, mentorship and policy. “I’m also responsible for HR, education and research, and now the Leadership Institute. When Murthy says something you listen! So that was it.”

Obviously he dotes on Murthy; so what was it like for him when he called it quits from day-to-day work at Infosys?

“It was a big personal loss for me. Murthy is such a brilliant man, I enjoyed going into the room and fighting with him, raising issues. He was my mentor; he mentored and challenged me to realise my potential. I learnt everything from him; how to be a better human being, the virtues of discharging obligations, to be courageous and stand up for what you believe in. I also learnt from him how to build a great company. He was like a foster father to me after I lost my father.”

Corruption

Did he have to deal with corruption and ethical issues?

“Yes, but comparatively less. First of all our need to deal with the government has been less compared to a manufacturing company. Two, we came at the right time when government activities vis-À-vis business came down in the liberalisation era. Three, because we were in technology and the export sector we were treated specially. The government did not understand what we were doing, and kept away! There was a mystery and aura about us.”

Also, he adds, IT had “a wonderful person called Dewang Mehta who created a brand equity for the industry”, and not too many “demands” were made from it.

But when they had to face corruption, “we remained steadfast and said we’ll not succumb and people respected us. For example in a North Indian city known for corruption, the officer said: “Infosys ko de do, donR 17;t waste time!”

Pai adds that integrity is very important in Infosys where background checks are rigorous; “we have low tolerance levels for breaches in integrity; if you breach you have to go.”

Dream for Infosys

“I want to see it become the most respected name in IT services in the world; we’re probably in the top 10 now, within 2-3 years we should be in top 5, but we have to become the most respected and symbolic of the aspirations of educated people the world over, recognised for quality, value system and ability to meet client needs.”

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