Don't look at businessmen as crooks: Sanmar chairman

Chennai: Stepping into the eighth floor conference room at the Sanmar Group’s headquarters in Chennai, one is reminded of the great Bengal painter, Jamini Roy’s art, modern in outlook and yet very traditional in drawing strength from one’s indigenous cultures. The captain at Chemplast Sanmar, N Sankar similarly mixes both.

As someone heading an enterprise, whose growth synchronized with the ups and downs of Tamil Nadu politics and the National politics at large in the last 50 years, Sankar makes a sober, very realistic assessment of broader social and political issues after the Kamaraj era.

“Tamil Nadu has done well, but it could have done better,” muses Sankar when asked about the growing administrative corruption in Tamil Nadu and slippages in governance.  

But significantly, “Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi is now doing a lot of things to improve governance and hope he would succeed,” said Sankar. “He (Modi) is trying to work on his vision; he is trying to bring in a change in the psyche,” adds Sankar.

However, “One has to look at businessmen as partners, not crooks; every potential businessman is looked as a crook; a few bad apples can’t spoil the whole basket. Yes, businessmen want to make money, but majority of them are patriotic, don’t want to harm the environment and are committed to the national idea of growth,” says Sankar.

With a nostalgic sigh on his face, Sankar acknowledged that Chemplast’s most ambitious project in the mid-1980s, ‘Metkem Silicon’, did not really take off. “It was a very unique process; solar energy was just taking off and India wanted to set up a national silicon facility. At that time, efforts by a team of research scientists led by R V Ramani, was being slowly integrated with Chemplast. They had their own processes to make polysilicon along with IISC scientists in Bengaluru. We set up a plant and then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited it (in 1985), the only visit by a sitting Prime Minister to a private sector plant after Nehru.”

Since it was a “very electro-intensive process,” Sankar said they were initially assured of power at lower and subsidized cost. But that did not happen. Yet by the 1990s’, rest of the world was developing newer technologies at lower costs and imports became easy. “The costs became totally unviable and so we had to close down as it did not make sense anymore,” adds Sankar.