No bribes for healthy business: corruption is bad for business, says Suresh Vazirani, managing director of an award-winning hi-tech company - Profile

For A Change, Dec, 2003 by Michael Smith

You are in hospital with a life-threatening illness. Malaria, say, or TB or hepatitis or, God forbid, HIV/Aids. The doctors need to diagnose exactly what you've got. And they need to know fast. They take a sample of your blood and run it through a state-of-the-art blood biochemistry analyser. Such machines can do up to 600 tests in an hour, in batches of 30 blood tests. They save lives.

In India, the market leader in manufacturing high-tech blood diagnostic machines is Transasia Biomedicals, based in Mumbai. The brainchild of Suresh Vazirani, the company's foundations were laid in 1985. Today it is a global player with exports to over 30 countries.

Three years ago Vazirani received the National Exports Award for advanced technology from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who also presented Vazirani's wife, Mala, with the National Quality Award for the leading biomedical company.

What especially marks out the Vaziranis and their company is their courageous and dogged stance against corruption. Avoiding corruption takes up more of his time than any other issue, he says, and his company employs two lawyers full-time to fight the cases that arise. When, for instance, he wanted to install a fountain in the lunch area, two government officials demanded a $100 bribe for a licence. Yet no such licences had been issued for 20 years. It took his lawyers four years in the courts, costing $4,000, to deal with the case.

Vazirani's interest in life-saving technology must have been his karma, says his wife Mala. For in his heart he had really wanted to be a doctor. But his parents sent him, one of seven children, an a scholarship to study electrical engineering at Nagpur University.

His parents had fled from Pakistan at the time of Partition in 1947, bringing nothing with them. As a young man, Vazirani had blamed the politicians for his family's deprivation and for corruption. Therefore, he says, he regarded it as his right to travel without paying for a ticket and to steal library books. But then he encountered Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) and this challenged him 'to walk the talk, to rise above blame towards responsibility'.

On graduation, he decided to be an unpaid volunteer with MRA. For nine years he helped to run industrial leadership training programmes at Asia Plateau, MRA's conference centre near Pune. There he would urge businessmen not to be corrupt, he recalls. That's all very well, they would reply, but you've never run a business. You don't know what it's like.

The challenge rankled with Vazirani, but he knew it had some truth. So when after nine years with MRA he needed to earn an income, he decided to go into business himself. In 1979 he and a friend, Satish Sutaria, registered the company name of Transasia, 'as a reminder of Asia Plateau', Vazirani says. He was 29 and had just 250 rupees (about 4 [pounds sterling]) to his name from his final honorarium from MRA.

GAMBLE

Their idea was to create an importing and marketing company. They had no capital to start a factory, and not even enough to rent an office. But thanks to their experience with MRA, says Mala, 'they wanted to do something of central relevance, definitely in industry, health care or social services. They wanted to make a difference where it really could count.'

Sutaria's mother sold some jewellery to help them get started, and a dental manufacturing businessman, Surendra Patel, and his wife, Tara, let them use their dining room in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri as an office. From there they wrote 100 letters to companies all over the world, offering their marketing services, with hardly any response.

Then Tara's brother sold an apartment and offered to loan them the money. Sutaria felt uneasy about whether they could ever repay the loan. But Vazirani leapt at the opportunity and, taking the biggest gamble of his life, bought a six-month round-the-world air ticket. He wanted to find out what the world was making that India most needed. This was too much for Sutaria, who decided to quit the partnership.

Vazirani visited medical manufacturing companies in Florence and Rome--it was unprecedented for an Indian marketer to turn up on the doorstep. In Tokyo he met a dynamic young export manager, Shimoyama, also handling medical machines, who had visited India after his graduation. They immediately established a rapport and Shimoyama felt he could trust Vazirani to give good customer service. These encounters gave Vazirani his big break and he returned to Mumbai a fully signed up distributor of Italian and Japanese medical diagnostic machines.

Initially he knew little about the machine parts or their application but he set about getting training on his own, clearing the imported machines through customs, installing them and training the customers.

But it was a big leap from importing to manufacturing. The potential market was vast, not only in India but also in China and Africa. The imported machines were expensive and prone to failure. The service engineers that Vazirani employed gave him the confidence that they could assemble them locally themselves.