March 2, 1998

Roller skates save money for the the company and keep factory workers happy

By Ramesh Vinayak

At first, it appears to be a huge rink with a skating competition going on. Hordes of youngsters in grey uniform zoom past on roller skates in the brightly-lit hall as big as a football field. In a corner, older men cautiously tread the floor on their skates under the watchful eyes of no less an expert than the coach of the Indian roller hockey team. But if this is a rink, then what are these gigantic machines with thousands of whirring spindles doing here? Look carefully, and you realise that this is a textile spinning unit.

This, however, is no ordinary factory floor. And no, the unit isn't unique because it doubles as a skating rink. Recently set up in the picturesque foothills of the Shivaliks near the erstwhile princely town of Nalagarh in Himachal Pradesh, the Rs 400 crore project of Gontermann-Peipers (India) Limited, a textile division of the Ispat Group, has introduced what promises to be a novel strategy for enhancing productivity: working on wheels.

Since it went on stream in August last year, the unit has trained half of its 500-strong workforce to skate. "The underlying idea in the work-on-skates culture is to double the efficiency of both men and machines," explains Sanjeev Datta, coach and former two-time national roller-skating champion. Adds Y.C. Gupta, president, textile division: "It's a new concept for better output with lesser fatigue." Six years ago, Gupta had seen waiters on skates serving clients in a restaurant in Thailand with poise and elan. He wanted to extend that to breaking the tedium of working with state-of-the-art, fully automatic machines in one of the country's largest spinning units.

However, making skating mandatory for all the workers and supervisory staff, including senior executives, wasn't simply a question of issuing a memo. Most of the employees required training. The company has engaged Datta and another national skating champion, Amarjit Singh, who train five batches a day. But even before this, the spadework had already been done: from installing friction-free Kota-stone flooring to acquiring specially-made skates. Says S.L. Wahi, manager (HRD): "We studied every aspect in detail to make sure the worker feels absolutely comfortable in the skates since he has to wear them for eight hours at a stretch." So, the company went in for more expensive skates with imported wheels costing Rs 2,000 each. It also took a lot of effort to make the first batch of semi-literate workers shed their diffidence. Says an exuberant Charanjit Sharma, among the first to be trained: "On skates I feel light like a bird." And less tired, considering that workers covered at least 6 km on foot daily while attending to the machines.

The training costs the company Rs 150 per worker but the returns are worth much more. For instance, if one worker on foot could handle two ring-frames of spindles, on skates he can handle three. Says Prashant Aggarwal, manager (project): "A skating worker can put in an extra four hours daily." Which means the company could cut down its manpower requirement from 1,200 to 700. Another advantage is the reduction in breakage of yarn. Workers constantly monitor the spindles for breakage of yarn. The cost of a minute's delay in piecing together the snapped yarn on a spindle works out to about Rs 1.28. Workers on skates save Rs 5 lakh a day on this count.

An interesting spin-off is that the workers can be groomed into professional skaters. "The day is not far off when the unit will churn out yarn as well as skating champions," says Datta. The management recently sponsored the Indian roller hockey team for a tournament in South Korea. Some young workers, like 19-year-old Arunesh Tiwari, are already dreaming of becoming professional skaters. "I had seen skating only in the movies," he says. "In real life, it's much more exciting." As for the less ambitious workers, it's anyway turning out to be all work and all play.

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