Disclaimer: This article has been triggered by a museum project that my wife Tasneem has spearheaded over the past decade or so.
The restoration of the erstwhile Victoria & Albert Museum of Mumbai, now named Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, to its pristine splendour is a microcosmic example of how trilateral partnerships between the government (as the custodian of national assets), the private sector (with its management, marketing & financial resources) and the NGO community (as the providers of niche expertise and local knowledge) can ?bit by bit? overcome the systemic blockers to excellence in performance.
The museum is the oldest in Mumbai and the second oldest in India. It came into existence as the result of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. At the time, along with other colonies, the Bombay Presidency sent an array of artifacts, depicting the history, culture, commerce and topography of Mumbai for display at the exhibition. The authorities made a replica of everything that was sent to London and it was to house these copies that funds were raised. A wonderful building in classical Palladium style architecture was completed in 1872.
Sadly, over the years the building and its exhibits lost their lustre. In the mid-1990s, when my wife as the head of the Mumbai chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) ?discovered? the museum, it was in a state of total degradation. Tasneem persuaded the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai, which owned the museum, to allow INTACH to undertake its restoration. They agreed on condition that funds be raised from the private sector. Rahul and Neeraj Bajaj met this condition with a generous donation and eventually a trilateral trust deed was signed between INTACH, the Jamnalal Bajaj
Foundation and the municipal corporation. The uniqueness of the deed was the recognition that the project needed to draw upon the diverse but complementary assets of each partner.
A decade of effort and there is only one word to describe the transformation: extraordinary. Unesco awarded the project its highest accolade of excellence in 2005. Why do I believe this small and specialised project has broader significance? Why does its model warrant further reflection? Why this article? The answer to my mind lies in the complexity of contemporary economic and social development. The government must, of course, bear preponderant responsibility for addressing the aspirations of its citizen. But in today?s connected, competitive and resource-constrained world, the government does not have all the tools. It needs the support of the particular expertise and resources of business and civic society. A participative, multipronged developmental model is what is required.
To some extent government and businesses have started to share a common platform. This is partly because of the altered relationship between the two. In the days of the licence raj, businesses were supplicants of the government. This is no longer so. It is also because businesses do realise that they cannot remain cloistered within their corporate domain. They have to be more broadly engaged. But this sharing is still episodic, personal and unstructured. There is no formal vehicle through which the diverse, uniquely distinctive skills and assets of say Unilever (marketing & distribution), Wipro (IT), Reliance Industries (project management) and HDFC (financial innovation) can be pulled together in partnership with government to identify and promote income and employment generating opportunities. Such a vehicle, if it did exist, could bring to the development state-of-the-art technology; management know-how, project management capabilities, marketing & distribution assets and innovative financing. Most people believe that a partnership between the government, the private sector and civic society is impossible to structure. They maintain that the interests of the various parties are misaligned and too wide to bridge. One reason why I have pegged this article on the museum project is because it belies this view and offers an example of what can be achieved if indeed the government, the private sector and civic society do successfully leverage their respective strengths and assets towards a common goal.
The challenge, of course, is to sustain excellence. It is one thing to execute a project with a defined goal and timetable successfully, another to ensure that it is run continuously to comparable standards. The restoration was successful because the individuals involved were uniquely committed. The question is whether the museum will be run equally well. I do not know the answer but I do know that like any developmental project, it will depend on whether the municipal corporation is able to institutionalise the idea of excellence that motivated its restoration.
?The author is chairman of the Shell Group of Companies in India. These are his personal views
