ONGC Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd is one of the biggest Public sector companies (PSU) in India. There are around 28000 (Twenty Eight thousand) employees in ONGC, out of which around 7500(Seven thousand Five Hundred) are SC-STs.

Recently National Commission for Scheduled Castes had summoned ONGC Interim CMD Alka Mittal in the matter related to Corporate Promotions of SC-ST officers in ONGC.

In a meeting held with ONGC senior executives on 4th February, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes has asked several serious and critical questions and sought data relating to corporate promotions and violations of rules in this regard.

The website Petrowatch.com has already published detailed news on its website.

To know the details of the case, we spoke to some retired SC-ST officers of ONGC.

Q1) What do you think is the reason for the non-representation of SC-ST officers at the top management level like General Managers, Group General Managers, Executive directors i.e E7, E8 and E9 and Director levels?

Ans: The Recruitment & Promotion Policy was last revised in 1997 & 2004. Thereafter no Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been entered between management and the officers association. The ONGC management does not consult the SC-ST association which is representing around 7500 employees of ONGC on R&P matters which directly affects their career growth.

The Corporate Promotion policy was changed unilaterally twice in the year 2014 and again in 2015. The changes were made in such a way that the majority of the junior general category officers were promoted superseding the majority of experienced, eligible and meritorious SC-ST executives.

The result is thousands of eligible SC-ST candidates are left behind and there is literally a negligible representation of SC-ST executives at the top level.

Q2) But ONGC being a PSU and Government of India company, is it not following the DOPT and DPE guidelines on Recruitment and Promotion?

Ans: Although all DPE guidelines are applicable to ONGC, ONGC is unilaterally modifying the rules and completely violating the Government of India guidelines.

Those eligible SC-ST executives who are superseded by their juniors, these SC-ST officers are from India’s to most premier institutes like IITs, IIMs, ISM Dhanbad, NITs etc.

And the most important point here is they are not demanding any reservation in promotion, the point is why an officer who is 4-5 years junior to SC-ST is getting promoted whereas the SC-ST Officers are already eligible, experienced, competent and meritorious. This is nothing but a blatant violation of rules, daylight robbery and discrimination based on CASTE.

Q3) Can you explain this in detail:

Ans: Management is using various methods to supersede eligible SC-STs like expanding the zone of consideration for junior executives (More batches in the Cut-Off criteria) despite an available number of eligible SC-ST executives, Use of external agency for Assessment Development Centre-ADC), Marks for Potential Assessment with DPC etc.

Suppose as per eligibility 100 Nos of SC STs from the 2016 Batch are eligible for promotion from say year 2020. The total number of eligible candidates including the General category in the 2016 Batch is around 300. So the selection should be among the total 300 from 2016 only.

But what management is doing it is considering all officers from the years 2017, 2018 and even 2019 say (300+300+300=900) more from subsequent years wherein the majority of experienced, eligible and meritorious SC-ST officers are deliberately not considered and junior general category are promoted year after year.

Although the discrimination history of SC STs in ONGC is very old, the promotion rules changed from the year 2014-2015 when SRD (special recruitment drive) batches of SC-STs became eligible for the promotion. Had the procedure been followed properly, the majority of SC ST would have been promoted but simply to bypass them, junior batches were considered.

Not only this even some who are promoted are deliberately given insignificant postings and kept away from Key Positions.

Here the entire process and mechanism need overhauling.

As per Rule 3 of Companies (Appointment and Qualification of Directors) Rules, 2014 every listed company or any other public company, having certain paid-up share capital or turnover shall appoint at least one woman director. Now, this step was taken by the government to have a fair representation of Women in the Corporate Board Room.

Why can’t a similar provision be made for SC-ST-OBCs who constitute around 85% of the country’s population and have negligible representation in the Board of Directors?

Moreover, they are facing discrimination across organisations/companies. Poor representation of SC/ST not only reflects the mindset prevailing at the top level in organisations but also the age-old caste bias in India.

Recently parliamentary standing committee has expressed its displeasure that there is no SC or ST member in the Board of Directors of the State Bank of India (SBI), India’s Largest Public sector bank noting that their representation must be provided in order to adequately safeguard their interests.

The committee not only recommended due representation of eligible SC and ST members on the Board of Directors but also for concession/relaxation, if any required, for the purpose.

The SC-ST Community rarely entered into board room not because they are not meritorious or qualified enough but they are systematically persecuted so that high caste dominant leadership can be maintained across the organisation at each and every level

This strategy is adopted in most of the PSUs and SC-STs is not having proper representation at a higher level

Coming Back to ONGC, Most of the SC/ST Executives are not assigned any CRC positions (Key Decision Making and Sectional Head Positions) though they may be senior to other so-called high caste executives.

There are several cases in which a junior executive is assigned a CRC Position as he enjoys the confidence of top management because he belongs to their caste lobby. However, most of the SC-ST Executives have to struggle till their retirement for such positions.

The irony is that some SC-ST officers are given promotions when just 5 to 6 months of their service is left and let me tell you these are not supernumerary promotions. What leadership quality an executive will develop and what benefit ONGC will have from such officers with just 5-6 months of service left? On the other hand, some vacancies are deliberately eaten up by such practice. Had the same been given to SC-ST executive who has say 10 years of service left, he could have climbed the corporate ladder to reach a higher level.

This Systematic persecution of SC STs in ONGC has not only demoralised them but most of them have lost confidence in Top management high caste Leadership.

The entire process of promotion is so subjective that SC STs are at the mercy of management. Now they have even restricted that Performance Appraisal Marks (PAR) rating of outstanding/excellent cannot be given to more than a certain number of employees at each level. Now you tell me can we expect a so-called High caste Boss to give outstanding marks to an SC-ST given a choice to choose between general and SC-ST?

Again ONGC hires services of an external agency for ADC (Assessment Development Centre) which assesses employees and grants ADC Marks of 20( Twenty) for Corporate promotion. This third-party ADC is highly subjective and ambiguous as it does not have any expertise to evaluate domain expertise.

ONGC Top management is so obsessed with such people who are having more vocal power irrespective of their technical expertise. Most of the SC/ST are not vocal as they are systematically persecuted, isolated and deprived of participating in decision-making process.

Their contribution to providing effective technical solutions is major strength however they are judged on the basis of general theoretical concepts which is not relevant in absence of objectivity in the system.

How can an ADC conducted by an external agency evaluate the various parameters in single day interaction such as Team leadership, Planning and decision making, developing self and others, influencing etc.

As Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar rightly said, “They want to maintain the Status Quo”.

Now the time has come to break it.

Q4) Is there any SC-ST Director on the board of ONGC or its subsidiary companies?

Ans: There is absolutely no representation of SC-STs officers in the ONGC Board or any subsidiary companies. Forget about the Board, out of 91 Executive directors ie E9 level, there is only 1 ST, 6 SC 1 OBC and the situation is somewhat similar for Group General Managers ie E8 level, E7 etc.

You visit the official site of ONGC and see the composition of the ONGC Board year after year. You will only find the Sharmas, the Dwivedis, and the Mishras etc.

Just a few months back ONGC CMD and Director (Finance) was Subhash Kumar Sharma, ONGC Videsh Ltd Director (Finance) was Vivekanand Sharma, ONGC’s Director (Onshore) is Anurag Sharma who has posted three other Sharmas (All Executive Directors) as Project Head of ONGCs three important Assets. So where is the Diversity?

ONGC talks about inclusive growth. Where is the inclusiveness?

The Mission statement of ONGC Reads “Foster a culture of trust, openness and mutual concern to make working a stimulating and challenging experience for our people”.

Where are the trust and openness?

The tragedy is that some SC-ST officers completely surrender to the management for petty personal gains and self-interest. They talk in the same tone of management. For them, the grass is always green. They suddenly start talking about Merit after taking all the benefits of the reservation policy. For them, there is no such thing like caste-based discrimination despite their community being humiliated and harassed. Management nurtures them and makes use of them against their own people.

Many employees resort to filing RTI applications because of a lack of transparency, some take the judicial route to get justice after repeated attempts to get justice in ONGC.

One more thing, many SC-ST officers who do this or get vocal in raising their voices are harassed, punished by not giving them promotions and transferred abruptly.

There are instances when issues of corrupt practices and policy violations were raised by SC-ST officers, but instead of punishing the corrupt, the whistleblowers were punished.

ONGC spends crores of rupees in hiring advocates to fight against its own employees who seek justice in the court of law.

Such are the blatant violations by ONGC management that a few years back one senior Scheduled Caste officer had filed an FIR under the SC-ST Atrocities Act against several senior executives of ONGC including Directors.

We seriously fail to understand, Why the ONGC management is still treating the SC-STs as Untouchables.

The question here is: Can we become the best place to work after repeatedly leaving behind the majority of experienced, eligible and meritorious SC-ST Officers?

Q5) Is the SC-ST Association in ONGC doing something on this?

Ans: Yes. They have time and again taken up the matter with ONGC management but no satisfactory reply was received. Finally, they have taken up the matter with the National commission for scheduled castes and Tribes who is kind enough to have taken cognizance of the serious violations in Recruitment and Promotions. They have also issued summons to ONGC CMD and sought all the data etc. We personally thank NCSC to have taken up the matter to do justice to thousands of eligible, experienced and meritorious SC ST Officers in ONGC.

One more thing. These irregularities in corporate promotions are Just the tip of the iceberg. Similar bias and irregularities is happening in Recruitments and Transfers. There are serious cases of violations in recruitment at various levels. Some executives were taken on deputation without any formal advertisement in a most dubious manner and they are timely promoted superseding their seniors in ONGC.

Those sitting in one place at the Corporate/Headquarters Office for 15-20 years are deciding the Transfers and Postings of SC-STs who have honestly completed more than three regions including North-East as per policy.

We have suffered a lot while we were in service. We hope the community gets justice this time.

As you can see, and as we have also seen on the ONGC India website, the majority of the ONGC Board members are from the so-called upper castes year after year while ONGCs Oil and Gas production has been declining/falling drastically. Is this the definition of Merit in India?

Thousands of eligible and meritorious SC-ST Officers in ONGC are denied promotion and Key positions year after year and government of India rules and regulations are violated blatantly. This is nothing but Systemic Persecution of SC STs in ONGC. Is this the real 21st century model of Corporate Casteism?

Now that National Commission for SC has taken up the matter, thousands of SC ST Officers are awaiting Justice…

Velivada Editorial