Spotlight: ONGC transparency
Within ONGC, there's growing disillusionment among some employees about what they see as a growing lack of transparency.
Take Madan Lal Bhari, a superintending engineer in Ankleshwar, who wrote to the President of India, Droupadi Murmu, on May 15 (2024) to raise concerns that ONGC faces an existential crisis. Bhari asks the President to "save" ONGC.
"Is there a plan to shut down or sell ONGC?" writes Bhari. He claims chairman Arun Singh told senior employees that 4.5m t/y of oil and oil equivalent gas has vanished from nomination fields in the last four years.
He also claims that Singh told employees that 3-4% of ONGC "vanishes yearly." "The very next day, our director of production, Pankaj Kumar, held a video conference with all officers and appealed to them to surrender their Performance Related Pay," Bhari writes in Hindi.
"If ONGC's financial condition is poor, wouldn't the performance-related pay automatically be zero? Why, then, was there a need to surrender it?" Bhari flags concerns about a lack of transparency and asks why a private company has allegedly been doing "3D videography" of ONGC offshore platforms. Bhari is not the only one complaining.
On May 28 (2024), the All India SC/ST Employees Welfare Association, which represents employees from India's disadvantaged communities, wrote to the ONGC chairman to allege favouritism towards a CGM production (name withheld) posted in Dehradun as human resource planner of production between 2009 and 2022 and later at the ONGC Academy in Dehradun. "After six months, he again transferred from ONGC Academy to OVL and ONGC in Delhi from January 1 (2023) to May 31 (2023)," alleges association president DS Kamble.
"He again managed a posting back to ONGC in Delhi on June 1 (2023) as an executive assistant to the director of production, and recently, he transferred to the director HR office as head employee relations in Delhi; his posting as Head-ER at Delhi is yet another classic case of favouritism and nepotism and a smooth cakewalk for him to get a promotion next year since as a production person, he would not have been eligible as he doesn't have any exposure to offshore fields in his entire career."