CPCL–SOOPER MMA Leadership Lecture Series | Inaugural Edition Jointly organised by Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL) and the Madras Management Association (MMA)
Mr H Shankar
Managing Director, Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL)
It is a privilege to set the context for the inaugural session of this leadership lecture series, whose first theme is public sector leadership in nation building, from legacy to future readiness. As India advances toward becoming a developed nation, I believe public enterprise has a defining role to play, and I begin with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’s words: dreams transform into thoughts, and thoughts result in action.
CPCL’s own story is proof of that idea. Conceived in 1965 as Madras Refineries Limited, our first unit came up in 1969 as a 2.5 million metric tonne refinery, commissioned in just 27 months, a remarkable feat for its time. Today we are a 10.5 million metric tonne refinery, the only one in Tamil Nadu, serving the state as well as Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala. We built our first sulphur recovery unit decades before environmental consciousness became mainstream, moved from analog to digital control systems in 1984, and commissioned Asia’s first sewage reclamation plant that same year. By 2009 we had added a desalination plant that made us a zero-groundwater, zero-river-water refinery, and in 2007 we commissioned our first windmill farm. We also developed specialised fuels for the defence and space sectors, including JP-5, JP-7 and ISROSENE.
None of this happened in isolation. CPCL was conceived as a refinery that builds an ecosystem where the wider community prospers alongside us, as seen in our own polytechnic college, now in its silver jubilee, with near-total placement. I want to specially thank Mr B Ashok, who as Chairman of Indian Oil and CPCL between 2014 and 2017 conceptualised what would become the Cauvery Basin Refinery and Petrochemicals project, and Mr V R Deenadayalu, whose tenure as Chairman and Managing Director from 1982 to 1990 left an indelible mark on our journey and to whose memory this lecture series is dedicated.
As the saying goes, a ship is safe in harbour, but that is not what ships are built for. We have redrafted our vision and mission to be future-ready, and this year we launched CPCL SOOPER, our retail brand, beginning with outlets at Nemam and our first company-owned outlet at Manali, with plans to scale to about 300 outlets nationally. Comfort is the enemy of achievement. This lecture series, which we intend to run for the next ten years with MMA, is part of that same spirit of moving forward rather than staying anchored.
Dr V. Anantha Nageswaran
Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India
For me this is not a lecture delivered from a distance, even though I am speaking virtually. Chennai Petroleum, then Madras Refineries Limited, was my first employer, from 1985 to 1990, and I owe much of what I have achieved to the exposure my seniors gave me, and to observing the long-horizon vision Mr V R Deenadayalu set for the company. It is fitting that this evening is dedicated to his memory.
My argument tonight is simple: the defining advantage of the public sector is its capacity to think and act over long horizons, and that is exactly the capacity India needs most right now. We are at a fork, not a crisis. The era of cheap global capital is over, and every dollar coming to India must clear a higher bar. Great power competition has hardened around strategic interest rather than efficiency, and the physical world, commodities and energy, has reasserted itself in ways this room understands better than most.
India’s private sector suffers from what I call a short horizon: a large domestic market lets firms grow without competing at the frontier, and successive shocks have taught companies to defer irreversible commitments. Asking a company to fund a decade-long research programme in this climate is like asking it to plant an orchard in a forest fire. The public sector, led well, is structurally immune to this problem. It is not run for a quarterly result, and it can take on projects that gestate over fifteen years and pay back over fifty.
That freedom must now be applied to four challenges: building strategic reserves across critical commodities and accelerating nuclear energy, which is immune to choke points; becoming the patient investor in research that the market will underprovide; nurturing small and medium enterprises, since a large public enterprise can be an anchor customer and technology teacher to its supply chain, and this is also where the jobs are, since India needs roughly eight million new jobs a year that frontier technology cannot supply alone; and compressing decision-making timelines, naming the entropy of process when it masquerades as caution. India’s standing in a multipolar world will rest on industrial capacity, not diplomacy alone.
I want to close with an idea from our own tradition: Preya and Shreya. Preya is the comfortable choice; Shreya is the harder, more consequential path, and the Katha Upanishad tells us the wise choose Shreya. As Tiruvalluvar put it two thousand years ago, effort begets prosperity, idleness ruin. The leaders we honour tonight treated their position as a trust, not a privilege, building institutions for a country they would not live to see fully arrive. That is the leadership India needs again, not louder, but longer in its vision.
Dr. Ashwin Mahalingam
Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Madras
It is always a pleasure to speak here, both because the room is always full and because CPCL and MMA never shy from a topic off the beaten path. One point from the address before mine stays with me: the private sector is trapped in a quarter-to-quarter mentality, but academia and the public sector can afford to think long, and that is exactly what India needs to achieve technological supremacy.
Today we are not in control of our technological destiny. Look at artificial intelligence: the debate is dominated by organisations outside India, and we are playing catch-up, partly because building these models needs computational capacity we lack, which traces back to our position in the semiconductor race. Technology moves through three stages: basic research, applied research, and translation into what the common man benefits from. India’s version of this chain has been broken; our universities have not done enough of the first stage.
IIT Madras illustrates the arc well. Founded in 1959 on government grants, its first decades were about undergraduate teaching with very little R&D, what I call version 1.0. About twenty-five to thirty years ago came version 2.0: universities, government and industry recognised that institutions could solve real problems, catalysing a culture of research over rote learning. We are now working toward version 3.0, where India invents technology rather than adopting it. The talent is not in doubt; what we lack is resourcing. A researcher who nearly published in a top journal told us the difference was a microscope: peers abroad could resolve structures at the angstrom level, ours only at the nanometre level. This is where the public sector has quietly stepped in. Through CSR funding, we now have India’s first cryo-electron microscope facility at IIT Madras, an investment unlikely to yield a breakthrough in three months but very possibly in five to fifteen years, exactly the horizon only the public sector will fund. In recent years the public sector has invested roughly 150 crore in such facilities at IIT Madras alone, with CPCL and IOCL funding projects from sanitation in Nagapattinam to assistive medical technology.
A Kolkata science museum exhibit notes it takes an average of 14.1 years from discovery to Nobel Prize. By that measure, what we do today, fuelled by this new alignment of time horizons, will produce India’s Nobel-worthy breakthroughs by 2040 or 2047. The case for the public sector’s role is strong, but we must sustain this momentum for the next decade and more.
Mr. B Ashok
Former Chairman, Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) & Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL)
It is humbling to follow two such compelling speakers, and this subject is close to my heart after a career in the public sector, where, as I often say, nobody notices you when things go right and everybody notices you when things go wrong.
We could not be gathering at a more testing time. Since 28 February this year, the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly twenty million barrels of crude and a fifth of the world’s traded LNG pass daily, has seen marine traffic reduced to a near halt for over three and a half months, a disruption longer than the 1973 embargo or the Iran-Iraq tanker war. For India, which draws nearly 40% of its crude and 90% of its LPG and LNG through that strait, the exposure has been acute, even costing the lives of Indian sailors. Crises like this, like Covid, are where public sector oil and gas leadership does its most important work, almost always behind the scenes.
The global conversation on energy has shifted from a singular focus on transition to one balancing security and resilience, and India’s challenge is unusually complex because we face scale and transition simultaneously, when most countries deal with only one. Every energy form has a flip side, so leaders need a sequenced approach: security and affordability short term, efficiency and diversification medium term, decarbonisation long term.
Public sector energy companies operate under constant scrutiny, with decisions routinely second-guessed using hindsight unavailable at the time. Strong leadership explains these trade-offs transparently. On innovation, there is no shortage of talent in the public sector; what is missing is psychological safety. Innovation fails not for lack of ideas but because people fear the consequences of trying, and leaders must separate operational risk, tightly controlled, from innovation risk, which must be encouraged.
The next generation of energy leaders will need systems thinking, stakeholder empathy, since leadership will be less about command and more persuasion, and personal resilience to decide with incomplete information. A few lessons on developing leaders: push high-potential talent out of functional silos early, since deep specialists often struggle with enterprise-wide leadership; invest in external exposure even when cost pressures tempt organisations to cut it first; revive mentorship, once a PSU strength; and grow leaders from within, since outsiders spend much of their tenure simply learning the organisation. Above all, leaders need the humility to say, I may be wrong.
A narrow waterway has shown us how tightly energy, security, economics and society are interconnected, and public sector leadership managing this crisis should be judged not only on financial outcomes but on its ability to navigate uncertainty and take decisions whose consequences unfold years later. India’s energy journey is not simply transition, it is transformation while we continue to grow and industrialise, which demands pragmatic leadership anchored in national priorities. The real differentiator ahead will be institutions that learn, leaders who think beyond first-order outcomes, and cultures where innovation is protected rather than feared.
