In what could be the beginning of a trend in India’s rapidly expanding refining sector, as many as 50 senior engineers recently quit Reliance Industries (RIL), the country’s largest private sector oil refiner.
All the engineers, working at RIL’s recently commissioned refinery at Jamnagar, quit in July and at least 15 of them have joined HPCL Mittal Energy Ltd’s upcoming 9-million-tonne Guru Gobind Singh Refinery at Bathinda in Punjab, a company source said.
A senior official at the state-owned refinery confirmed the development. “Some 15 people from Reliance’s Jamnagar refinery joined the HPCL Mittal refinery. They are all engineers involved in refinery operations,” the HPCL official said.
Reliance spokespersons did not respond to queries on the development.
Where the remaining RIL engineers joined could not be ascertained either.
An RIL official said on condition of anonymity that the company was an “obvious target” for poaching by others, given the massive scale of its refining operations and the fact that it had recently commissioned with a grassroots refinery.
Reliance operates two refineries in Jamnagar, both of which were built by Reliance Petroleum Ltd, which got merged with Reliance Industries on both occasions after the refineries were commissioned.
“No major refinery has come up in the public sector after MRPL (Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd). So the new generation of experts in the field will have to come either from Reliance or Essar (Oil), both of whom have set up refineries recently,” the Reliance official said.
Analysts believe that although it may not be a major setback for the country’s largest company, it definitely points to an emerging trend in the sector that faces acute shortage of skilled and “experienced manpower”.
“I don’t think this will be a major thing for Reliance. Refining is anyway a more capital intensive industry than human resource one like IT, where attrition is a big deal,” an analyst with an international brokerage said.
However, some analysts believe things could get difficult going forward, as a lot of new refining capacity is coming up in India.
“There is a lot of capacity coming up and we will see refining capacity in India going up from nearly 180 million tonne per annum now to 250 million tonne per annum by 2020. And you have limited experienced manpower. Attrition and poaching would be the order of the day,” said Saeed Jaffery, analyst at Ambit Capital.
Analysts said while Reliance, being one of the biggest refiners, may initially be the target for upcoming refineries to poach skilled manpower, the company itself is more than capable of fighting it out in the game of retaining and attracting manpower.
“Sometimes it may be a pull for people who may be playing an insignificant role in Reliance but are offered a significantly important position by a competitor,” an analyst said.
NewsWire18
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