Anant Sardeshmukh, 70, former general secretary of Mahratta Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture (MCCIA), finds the biggest difference between Pune and Mumbai is that the former has a more agile industry and better trained employees. That’s what I was doing.
“Thanks to the higher education of its workers, Pune’s industry was able to escape the fate of the textile mills of Mumbai, which met an untimely death due to slow technological adaptation and violent trade unionism.” The union tried to move into the industrial areas of Pune but was not successful due to these reasons,” he said.
small town with narrow streets
Mr. Sardeshmukh’s association with the city began in 1958, when his father moved to Pune from Hyderabad. “Pune in those days was a small town, with distinct seasons and narrow roads. Back then, mid-summer rains brought down summer temperatures by mid-May,” he says.
What made Pune special was the presence of well-maintained, clean buses and, of course, the most common means of transportation, bicycles, on the roads. As a student of the Nutan Marathi Vidyalaya, the newly developed Purandare colony in Shukrawar Peth was home to the Sardeshmukhs.
“We traveled in buses run by Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC). The buses were regular and clean,” he said.
The neighborhoods of Kasbah, Narayan, Budhwar, Shukrawar, Sadashiv, and Ravival Peth were officially downtown. Newer areas such as Prabhat Road, Bhandarkar Road, Deccan and Ferguson College Road, with their bungalows and open spaces, were replicas of typical British towns. There were more trees than houses and cars. “Once the kids got a little older, cycling became the preferred mode of transportation. So when I enrolled at Ferguson College for my graduate studies, I cycled to and from college,” he said.
Distance was not much of an issue as young people from the neighborhood cycled to Khadki Street and Dehu Street to watch the opening day screenings of Hindi films. The afternoon was spent happily in the city, watching old Hindi matinee shows and English classics with Char Anna tickets at Alka Talkies, Vijay or Banuweeras Talkies. It was a luxury to book a balcony at Rs.
Ferguson College Road had some highlights like Vaishali, Deepali, Good Luck, Lucky and Roopali, but the crowd was lacking today. After 8pm, the roads were deserted, even FC Road! After graduation, Sardeshmukh moved to Mumbai for higher education and then to the US to further study business administration.
motorcycle capital
After taking a long break from the city, Mr. Sardeshmukh returned to Pune and worked at the newly founded Bajaj Auto Finance Company. Although it is now a standard financial product for banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), motorcycle finance was almost unknown at the time. Sardeshmukh was thus involved in what could be called the birth of a new field of non-bank finance.
Sardeshmukh said two-wheeler finance is an unprecedented concept. “Banks and other financial companies didn’t know how to finance the purchase of two-wheelers. As a pioneer in this field, Baja Auto Finance created a whole new field of consumer auto financing. “That will definitely be appreciated,” he said. The development of this equipment and product has taken place in the backdrop of very exciting changes in the two-wheeler industry led by late two-wheeler industry leader Rahul Bajaj. The company launched the perfect product in the two-wheeler sector and needed to raise funds to increase sales.
“The biggest challenge for banks was understanding how to create deeds and fill in the fine print while extending working capital loans to NBFCs. Two-wheelers were securities and not a very clear title. But it took time for banks to understand how this works as loanable equity. We have to work closely with banks to ensure that funds are available to NBFCs. “I remember having to assist them in preparing hypothetical deeds,” he said.
Sardeshmukh said there were two important achievements during this period. The birth of two-wheeler finance as a product and the easy availability of finance led to demand for two-wheelers among customers.
“Interest rates were high back then, so EMI as a concept was born then,” he says. Thanks to the work of these financial companies, loans were easily available, demand increased and the city was transformed into a two-wheeler capital.
“The main reason for the rise in popularity of two-wheelers was the ease of financing. The rapid expansion of the industrial environment also saw the need for personal transportation,” he said.
Currently, Mr. Sardeshmukh serves on the boards of a number of companies and also consults small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups.
violent trade unionism
In the late 1980s, Pune’s industrial landscape was rocked by violent trade unionism, which threatened to undo years of hard work and permanently damage the industrial atmosphere. “What happened in Mumbai’s textile industry was a combination of many reasons. Firstly, the local workforce was low-skilled and the industry itself could not improve and was already in the red. In this case, the industry, which was primarily the auto and auto parts industry, was not keeping up with new technology and the workforce was also much more skilled. We opposed the demand and helped Pune industries escape the sad fate of Mumbai textile factories,” he said.
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Although information technology, or software, was born in the mid-1990s, the development of IT exports had a lot to do with what he called a reverse brain drain. “The government has made a conscious effort to reach out to software companies and the development of Hinjewadi Park was also a milestone. MCCIA and Satish Magar led a delegation of business people to the Bay Area of the United States. I remember observing the IT industry efforts there,” he said.
“Initially, there were many obstacles to IT exports. In fact, this was a new subject and companies used to send their products on writable CDs. There is also an amusing anecdote about customs officials opening and cutting CD boxes in the past, he added.
If there’s one thing industry veterans want to tackle right now, it’s transportation systems. “But thanks to Metro, we hope things will get better,” he said.