HNGIL.
A year after the Madhvani-Turner Group took over HNGIL, the most telling changes are the ones made for the people on its shop floors.
For four years after Hindusthan National Glass & Industries (HNGIL) entered a resolution process in October 2021, the people who worked its plants did something that rarely gets written about. They kept turning up. The process ran its long course, and through all of it the furnaces that were still running needed people to run them. Those people had no way of knowing whether there would be a company left to work for at the end.
There was. Last year, INSCO acquired the company for Rs 2,250 crore, backed by Cerberus Capital Management and the International Finance Corporation. INSCO belongs to the Madhvani-Turner Group, one of Africa's leading conglomerates, with a presence across the globe. HNGIL completed its first year under the new owners on 26 September. Much of what has changed in that year has been aimed at the people who stayed.
Employees now have medical insurance and accident insurance. Travel policies have been rewritten. Salaries have been corrected to bring them in line with the market, after several years in which increments did not come through at all. A new referral policy lets employees recommend people they know for jobs at the plants, which matters now that the company is hiring again. Long term wage settlements have been signed, so workers can plan their household finances knowing what they will earn in the years ahead. Canteens and washrooms have been rebuilt, which means the places people eat and rest during a long shift are finally fit for them.
The numbers behind it are considerable. Bahadurgarh employs 1,300 people, Rishra about 900, Rishikesh 603, Naidupeta around 580 and Puducherry 400.
The owners also want more women on those floors. At the group's glass plants elsewhere in the world, bringing women into the factory workforce has been a priority, and that thinking is now being carried into HNGIL. Separate rest rooms for women have been set up, which is often the first practical test of whether a plant is serious about hiring them. In an industry where Indian shop floors have traditionally been run by men, that will be watched closely.
The reason the family runs its businesses this way has a good deal to do with its own history. Muljibhai Madhvani left Gujarat as a boy and started the business in Jinja in 1914. By the time his sons were running it, the group was Uganda's largest private employer. In 1972 Idi Amin expelled the Asian community, the companies were seized and the family went into exile. When they returned in the 1980s the plants had been stripped, and the business had to be rebuilt along with the livelihoods that depended on it. The group has made container glass since 1966, first in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to supply its own breweries, and its Tanzanian works are still the largest container glass maker in East and Central Africa. Shrai Madhvani, who chairs HNGIL, and board member Kamlesh Madhvani have spent their working lives in such plants. In the countries where the group has built and run factories, it has come to be known as an employer that looks after the people on its shop floors.
The India connection is older than the deal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the family's sugar complex at Kakira in July 2018 and encouraged them to invest in India. Last year, as the HNGIL acquisition came through, Shrai Madhvani met him in Delhi and set out plans to invest up to Rs 10,000 crore in the country over five years.
The capacity has followed. Operational capacity was close to 1,100 tonnes a day at the handover and now stands at around 2,300 tonnes. Puducherry was recommissioned in February after nearly a decade out of use and runs at about 330 tonnes a day. Naidupeta restarted in August at 650 tonnes a day, making it the largest single furnace container glass plant in Asia, and will serve as the export hub. Rishra fired a second furnace in August with a third due before December, and Bahadurgarh is being expanded from 300 to 600 tonnes a day. Each of these will bring more work to the towns around the plants and boost employement.
It is too early to say how the turnaround will play out. But for the people who kept the furnaces going through four uncertain years, the first year under the new owners has given them something those years never could, which is the confidence that their jobs will still be there next year and for many years after that.
